I said in a beaming manner: "In addition to the fact that the Great Song Dynasty has to support a huge bureaucracy, the same severe thing as the redundant officials is the redundant soldiers, and this institution is not inferior, and it is even more than that, and it has eaten up most of the income of our Great Song Dynasty mercilessly." Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 info Nowadays, our army of the Great Song Dynasty can be said to be useless, a group of rice buckets, straw bales-" Those ministers looked at each other, and I suddenly remembered that I remembered the battle of Yashan, full of righteous indignation, blood boiling, and impassioned, but I forgot that I was in a place but above the court, if those princes and ministers heard me say this, they would definitely not be able to stand it, and the ancients may not know the meaning of these two words, so I had an idea and changed my words." Actually, I don't have any other intentions, what I mean is that these soldiers eat like cattle, they can eat a bucket when they eat, and they are at ease at night, and they are wrapped in a haystack when they sleep, referred to as rice buckets and straw bales. I couldn't help but laugh in my heart.

I continued: "Because we raised an incomparably large army in the Great Song Dynasty, resulting in redundant soldiers, how huge is this team? Let's use data to speak, when the Great Song Dynasty Taizu, refined the forbidden army, for the elite of the army, the number of people is less than 200,000, but repeatedly performed miraculous feats, so that the enemy is frightened, heard the wind and fled, the country has a generation of talents, each leading the way for hundreds of years, but it is a pity that the heroes of our Great Song Dynasty in the past have long been old, dead and dead, everyone praises, women and children know that the Yang family generals are gradually withdrawing from the stage of history, the majesty is not there, it is long gone. At the time of Taizong, there were 350,000 forbidden troops, and at the time of Zhenzong, the number reached 430,000. By the way, there is currently a "Water Margin" published by Lizhou Publishing House on the market, you can also go and see it if you have time, the author is anonymous, although the content is nonsense, 90% of it is fictional, but the leopard head Lin Chong 800,000 forbidden army head is by no means virtual. In addition, with the addition of other regular armies and reserves, such as the van soldiers, we now have nearly 1.3 million soldiers to be supported by the state, and four-fifths of the government's annual revenue has to be spent on military expenditures. You must know that the invincible and invincible Tang Dynasty fought all over the surrounding countries, and the size of its army was less than 600,000 people.

I then changed my tone: "Then what is the truth? With so many soldiers, what is their combat ability? Unfortunately, the current forbidden army is all in the form of a fancy frame, especially the forbidden soldiers in the capital, who are freshly dressed and horse-dressed, and only know how to receive a salary, and even simple drills such as drills are extremely rare. What's even more excessive, even more ridiculous, is unbelievable that these people receive food every month, and they can't carry such a thing, so they have to hire a porter to help them carry it. Such a soldier who is powerless and is not even as good as a porter will have unimaginable consequences if he is sent to the northwest to fight against the tiger-wolf party. So if you take a look at the leopard, you can see that the million-dollar army we have spent hundreds of millions to build is just a fist and embroidered legs, and its combat effectiveness is very weak.

Moreover, in our Great Song Army, it is a lifelong system, and good people still have to carve words on their faces, making them look like prisoners, for fear that they will sneak away, which is very problematic and very inhumane. As a matter of fact, if we carefully calculate that life is short, and it is only 20 years for them to really be able to fight, so what should these soldiers do when they are old and frail? The current method is that they are old and frail, unable to fight, and are still relying on the old and selling the old, and are exercising power and fortune in the army, eating and drinking empty, and eating and drinking together, so that the population of our army is getting bigger and bigger, and their physique is getting weaker and weaker, and they are completely unable to fight, and there are problems in fighting. Therefore, our army is here to defend the country, to win battles, not to embroider pillows, not to look at the useless, but to look at the quality rather than the quantity. In order to maintain stability in the rear, our imperial court took raising troops as a national policy, resulting in more and more soldiers, but there was nothing we could do to fight, we fought by tactics and tactics, not to scrape together the number of people, not to make the enemy sound frightened, but to have the strength to kill the enemy.

In our army, there are still a large number of displaced people from all over the country, and most of these people are useless soldiers, who eat and drink in the army. The people depend on food, and once there is a natural or man-made disaster, there will be a large number of hungry people. The flow of a large number of hungry people in the territory of the Great Song Dynasty is an unstable factor affecting the harmony of the Great Song Dynasty, and our Great Song Dynasty government has taken emergency measures for the intensification of class contradictions caused by sudden disasters or wars, that is, a large number of soldiers are recruited. Since the soldiers recruited are not for the purpose of war but for social security, they will naturally not carry out effective military training for this part of the people, and they are also idle in the army, doing nothing, eating all day long, and doing nothing.

Therefore, if we look at the composition of our troops, we know that the combat effectiveness of such an army can be imagined, and our Great Song Dynasty has become the only dynasty in Chinese history that has adhered to the conscription system for a long time. Moreover, the officers and soldiers of the Song Dynasty generally had good treatment, so much so that in other dynasties in China, they often became the fuse of class contradictions, and in our Great Song Dynasty, they actually became the release valve of class contradictions. Whenever there was an accident in a place and the people were difficult to survive, the government recruited a large number of soldiers there, and for each person recruited, the court would have one more soldier, and the mountains and fields would have one less thief, which was also an important reason why there were fewer peasant uprisings in the Song Dynasty. Of course, the direct consequence of this is that a large number of redundant troops have been created, and now the total number of Song troops has reached 1.25 million, considering that our current population is only about 100 million at best, which is really an astronomical number. According to incomplete statistics, in the ninth year of Song Taizu's Kaibao (976), there were 378,000 soldiers in 3090504 households in the country, with an average of 1 soldier from 8.18 households, and in the second year of Song Taizong's reign (996), there were 666,000 soldiers from 4574257 households in the country, with an average of 1 soldier from 6.87 households. In the fifth year of Song Zhenzong's Tianxi (1021), there were 8677677 households, 19930320 mouths, and 912,000 soldiers in the country, with an average of 9.51 households sending 1 soldier, and the soldiers accounted for 4.58% of the population. In the third year of the reign of Emperor Yingzong of the Song Dynasty (1066), there were 1297221 households, 29092185 mouths, and 1,162,000 soldiers in the country, with an average of 11.12 households sending 1 soldier, accounting for 3.99%, and the number of soldiers reached about 5%. Because the Tang Dynasty of the previous dynasty was a recruitment system, the recruited professional soldiers surrounded the Jiedu envoys, forming a situation where only the Jiedu envoys were known and there was no emperor, and finally the three towns of Heshuo rebelled, resulting in the famous Anshi Rebellion. Tang's frontier defense benefited from the conscription system and the temperance envoy, and its demise also stemmed from this. So now the 1.25 million people in the Great Song Dynasty are all mercenaries, so military spending has repeatedly created miracles. During the Baoyuan period, Shaanxi alone spent 20 million yuan in peacetime and 33 million yuan in wartime, and such a huge military expenditure and other expenditures are also unique in Chinese history, and even our rich financial income sometimes exceeds its means.

In addition, the upper echelons of our court also have problems with the management of the army, and the army is divided into four types, the central forbidden army, the Zhuzhou town army (also known as the box army, the forbidden army and the box army all tattoo words on the face to prevent escape, called the matching army), the township soldiers (equivalent to the militia, not in the government establishment), and the Fan soldiers (the Qiang tribal groups recruited by the government in the northwest frontier, often used as the vanguard when fighting). The leading body of the forbidden army was changed to the front of the palace and the guard department, which were respectively led by the commander of the front of the palace, the commander of the infantry army, and the commander of the horse army. However, the three commanders did not have the right to send troops. The Song Dynasty set up a Privy Council in the center to be responsible for military affairs. The Privy Council was directly accountable to the Emperor and no other official was allowed to intervene. Although the Privy Council can send troops, it cannot directly command the army, which leads to the separation of the power to command the army and the power to transfer troops. The reason for this is that in order to eliminate the threat of local armed forces to the central imperial power, this set of measures for using civilian forces to control military forces and separating military powers has been formulated, so that the armed forces can contain each other and constrain each other at every turn, and many ills will arise. As Jia Changchao said: Now the general manager of the four roads in Shaanxi Province and the subordinates of the Ling Jurisdiction, the Metropolitan Supervisor, and the patrol inspector, all of them have participated in the military and politics, and the plan has been completed in the end. In addition, the Song Dynasty often changed the commanders of the army to prevent the emergence of personal forces in the army, and the commanders of the theater of operations in war were all civilian officials or eunuchs, and the change of strategy must be approved by the emperor. But the border defense does not need a box army at all, and the forbidden army needs to be called. The intention of the imperial court was always on the defensive. What's more critical is that the imperial court is afraid that there will be a powerful person in the yellow robe like the second Song Taizu in the army, so it stipulates that the forbidden army will be guarded in different parts, that is, one year to defend the frontier, one year to transfer the central government, and one year to change the frontier. The army tossed back and forth, and the general did not move, and the soldiers did not know the generals, and the generals did not know the soldiers.

In addition, his brother Song Taizong's policy of ordering generals from the middle of the imperial system was even better, and when the troops went out to fight, he gave the generals a formation map in advance, which seriously violated the minimum requirements of commanding operations based on local conditions and time. However, the emperor and the second and third ministers, who lived in the deep palace far away from the front line, arbitrarily formulated combat formations on the basis of subjective speculation, mistakenly pinned down and deprived the commanders at the front of the command of mobility, and greatly stifled the subjective initiative of the main generals on the battlefield to respond to emergencies. This erroneous practice has been used to this day, so that the weak soldiers of the Northern Song Dynasty, which were originally many and useless, are now in a single line of disaster, and they have fallen into passive command, and it has become inevitable that they will lose battles.

Now the imperial court wants to raise such a huge army, which is also very difficult for our economically developed Great Song Dynasty, because the number of soldiers is growing too fast and the officials are full of private pockets and always feel powerless, it is difficult to continue, so the imperial court opened a precedent for allowing the army to do business. As soon as this trend grew, the army's training became more slack, some of them were more idle, and some even actively went to the ranks of merchants, and they were mostly engaged in miscellaneous work on weekdays (that is, long-distance trafficking by the government), and even soldiers did not need to train soldiers, and they became textile workers by weaving wool and satin from morning to night, and the officials naturally became wealthy. The industry is good at diligence and frolic, God rewards diligence, and soldiers are rewarded for training, this kind of army that is busy with tedious chores and sparse martial arts, even for the small northwest state of Xixia, has been repeatedly defeated. Moreover, this policy of allowing the troops to do business has greatly weakened the combat effectiveness of the troops. The harm is not only this, because most of the income of the imperial court has to be used to support the army, it is inevitable that the people at the bottom will be even worse, and the expropriation will be rampant, and the poor soldiers will redeem the army, which will exacerbate the gap between the rich and the poor in the Great Song Dynasty, and make the wealth more concentrated in the hands of a few people. For example, the rich families and poor people begging on the streets in the capital today are clear examples. Moreover, since the period of Taizong of the Song Dynasty, there are a large number of military materials in the treasury rotten, and now the military materials are collected in the official treasury, and the 32 warehouses of silk accumulated in the treasury of the inner hall cannot be filled, and 20 warehouses are accumulated. Even in disaster years, the imperial court is reluctant to provide disaster relief, and must leave it to the army until it decays. ”

I saw that the princes and ministers in the court listened with relish and thoughtfulness, and continued: "Soldiers, the major affairs of the country, the place of death and life, and the way of survival, must not be ignored. Therefore, we must attach importance to the building of our army in an all-round way, and we want to effectively reform and rectify our army in the Great Song Dynasty. First of all, we must pay attention to Wen Taowu strategy from the ideological point of view, two-pronged, carry out military ideological education, now the economic conditions of the Great Song Dynasty are increasing day by day, the living conditions are becoming more and more well-off, the wind and snow, drinking and composing poetry, the years are so beautiful, so that the people of the Great Song Dynasty are more greedy for life and afraid of death, we must make it clear that they are not afraid of death as soldiers, afraid of death is not a soldier, people will eventually have a death, or lighter than the feathers, or heavier than Mount Tai, there is a country to have a home, there is no country and there is no home, under the nest, there is an egg?

Second, it is necessary to gradually and slowly streamline the army, and finally reach at least 500,000 disarmament, so as not to let these redundant troops become a cancer that endangers the imperial court, and completely abolish the relevant regulations that the army can be bought and sold.

Third, it is necessary to conscientiously improve the quality of the army, vigorously grasp the combat effectiveness of the army, increase the frequency and intensity of actual combat exercises, and train them to be fearless in the face of danger, brave and resourceful, and brave in killing the enemy. If you don't fight, you will win, know yourself and know your enemy, and the guiding principle of not losing a hundred battles, persist in carrying out effective military training for a long time, select outstanding and brave personnel, carry forward martial arts, advocate Wentao and martial arts, not be abandoned, practice for the whole people, and all the people are soldiers.

Then, ask them to familiarize themselves with the Art of War, and each of them has a copy. Sun Tzu stood in the standpoint of the emerging landlords, observed the war with relatively advanced ideas and methods, took a clear-cut stand to support the war theoretically, and called on people to actively study and participate in the war. Sun Tzu emphasized Qi Zheng in the use of soldiers, and he said that those who fight should be right and win with Qi. And we also have to adjust the structure of the troops, now the infantry is the main branch, with a small number of cavalry, and the chariot is gradually disappearing. Because there is no good pasture land to provide war horses to plague our armaments, but this is not possible, so we must readjust the structure of the armed forces, and we must no longer have a single branch of the armed forces, but we must take a two-pronged approach with multiple arms, cultivate more land, raise more horses, and create conditions if there are no conditions.

Finally, for our military attachés of the Great Song Dynasty, we should also improve their full treatment, and we should not kill military attaches with words, and we should not use suspicious people and suspicious people, and no longer let the emperor and the second and third ministers who live in the deep palace and stay away from the front line formulate combat formations based on subjective speculation. Rather, it is necessary to give full play to the mobile command power of the commanders at the front, return the command power to the officers and men at the front, and enhance the subjective initiative of the commanders and officers and men to respond to situations on the battlefield.

Along with redundant officials and redundant soldiers, redundant expenses caused a great burden on Song's finances, and by this time, this phenomenon has become very serious, and it must be reformed urgently. The annual income of the Song Dynasty reached 116.13 million, but the official and military expenditures amounted to 120.34 million. By analogy, the redundancy is in the later period, I estimate that the Song Taizu, Song Taizong's terrifying sealing pile library, Zuozang Treasury and other rich treasury will be completely depleted, and the emptiness of the treasury is just around the corner, and in the long run, our Great Song Dynasty will also be crushed by these three mountains. I'm not alarmist, but the facts in front of me, in fact, since the first emperor, the high-level of the Great Song Dynasty has actually noticed the fact that the daily use is gradually declining, and many ministers have written and come up with various plans - Wang Yuyan five things, Song Qi proposed three redundant and three fees, Fan Zhongyan Qingli New Deal, Wen Yanbo asked for the provincial army, all of which are about opening up sources and reducing expenditure, reducing redundant soldiers, cutting redundant officials, suppressing mergers, and managing finances, but in the end they ended up with no problems, and it was over, so I hope you will consider the villain's subtle words——"