This situation was more thoroughly exposed in the Battle of Tumubao, as the army that the emperor could mobilize, it was the actual core of a country's army, but only 200,000 Ming troops were mobilized in the Battle of Tumubao. 130,000 to 200,000, in general, less than 200,000, this is the upper limit of the number of Ming troops.

In this era, a force of this size was not enough to maintain a numerical advantage in the face of other forces, especially when going out to fight, and often fell into a local disadvantage, as was the case in the Battle of Luchuan.

The complex power environment in the Luchuan area made the Ming army not have the ability to control all areas in a short period of time, so it could only concentrate superior forces to attack the important strongholds of Luchuan, and in the case that the important strongholds were not the only ones, they needed to divide troops to defend, and the result was that the Ming army had a great numerical disadvantage over the Luchuan army in local areas.

And the Ming army was still able to win in many situations despite the numerical inferiority, at least in the early and middle years of Yingzong, it was still able to do it, and all the defeats showed that in fact, there was only a concentrated outbreak in the fourteenth year of orthodoxy.

To a certain extent, this phenomenon shows that the Ming army has the ability to win more with less, that is, the Ming army does not simply rely on strong national strength, more reserve forces, and crushing numerical superiority to win, on the contrary, it relies on the quality of the army to achieve victory.

In fact, like all the history that has happened, the heroic army relies on strong military strength, individual quality, excellent tactics, and wise strategy to win incredible victories at a small cost and price.

The army, which is often smeared, or plays the role of a villain, relies on numerical superiority and brute force to make up for its backwardness in military quality and military strategy, and pays a great price in exchange for victory in battle. This kind of victory may not even be worth as much as a real victory.

It must be clear that all greatness has a reason for greatness, and that it is necessary to see through the superficial curtain to see the essence closest to the truth.

In Jiang Yu's view, every period of rising power and every army that has left a good name in history has its individual soldier quality and even the overall military quality and military strategy in a state of superiority, and they are able to achieve victory and defeat the enemy and competitors only by relying on some large-scale advantages that seem to make the balance of war less fair, on the contrary, it is precisely the advantages in some real places that have enabled them to achieve victory.

They did not pay a greater price than the enemy, or in other words, they did have the ability to pay a greater price than the enemy on the battlefield to win, but they did not pay that much in the actual war, the reason is that they did not need to pay such a big price at all, they were able to win simply by fighting hard, catching and killing, or even winning more with less.

The same is true of the Ming army on the Luchuan battlefield in the fourteenth year of orthodoxy, it seems that the Ming army has a numerical advantage, but the advantage on the battlefield is not big enough. On the surface, it was the Ming army's backward military quality and improper strategic command, which only relied on national strength and manpower to maintain the war situation.

But the truth was the opposite, the Ming army went deep into Luchuan, far away from its stronghold, and faced the intricate forces around Luchuan.

The battlefield is a too abstract concept, people mention the battlefield, often may want a clear view at a glance, the war soldiers on both sides of the war here to fight in the vast open space, but in fact, the battlefield, especially many large-scale wars, such as the Battle of Luchuan, has happened several times, the time of ten years of the war, the space for its occurrence is very large.

Not to mention that it is impossible to see it all, even if it is necessary to get from one end of the battlefield to the other, it may take a considerable time, and this kind of time, for the dispatch of manpower, is by no means the time consumed by the imaginary battlefield that can be used for the mobilization and arrangement of troops in a short time.

The deployment of the army can completely surpass the basic organization of manpower. To put it simply, if you want to move manpower in a battlefield of this scale, then the basic connection between the military arrangements of each location will be lost, and strictly speaking, it will not be a single force at all, it will not be able to help each other, and it will be impossible to achieve any tactical coordination.

The result of the deployment of troops in the vast battlefield space is the dispersion of the army's manpower, the dispersion of troops, and the reduction of the actual number of troops in the pure sense. In each small battlefield area where the battle takes place, the distribution is actually the troops that have been transferred and arranged, and these troops have no basic connection with each other, they are not the same force at all, and they cannot be counted together in terms of numbers.

The number of enemies is not necessarily the case, especially in an expedition war like the Battle of Luchuan, there are tens of thousands of troops in the Mengyang area to attack Mengyang City, and on the other side, there are 100,000 soldiers and civilians near Jiangtou City to defend the city.

The actual situation faced by the Ming army was actually that its own hundreds of thousands of troops were scattered into various battlefields, facing different enemy troops, and the number of Ming troops in each place was only a part of the hundreds of thousands.

However, the enemy has a large number of manpower to deal with the Ming army in every part of the battlefield, although the number of soldiers they distribute in the combat part of each battlefield is less than the total number of the Ming army, but the total number of people combined is obviously more than that of the Ming army.

The enemy may not be connected between each part of the battlefield, for example, in the two parts of the Luchuan battlefield, the commander of the Luchuan Army in the Mengyang area is Sijifa, and the commander of the Luchuan Army in the Jiangtoucheng area is Silu.

Strictly speaking, they are not the same army, because the leaders and commanders are different, and the interest groups they represent are also different. But in essence, they are the same army, because their goal is the same, that is, to expand the power of Luchuan, eliminate the influence of the Ming Dynasty in the Luchuan region, and be the enemy of the Ming army in the Battle of Luchuan.

They are not the same army, not because they do not cooperate with each other, because they are geographically different, it is simply impossible to achieve cooperation. At that time, it was the jungle area of the Indochina Peninsula that had not yet been invented and even the number of cavalry was very small, and the distance of hundreds of kilometers between different battlefield areas determined that they could almost be regarded as different battlefields, and they could not be coordinated and dispatched at all.

The ancient field conditions were a hundred times more severe than the later wars, they did not have any mechanized equipment for long-distance support and attack, and all the battles were limited to a small range, and it was for this reason that the Mongolian cavalry, those with a certain degree of long-distance running and supporting capabilities, would show terrible combat effectiveness in the war.

Looking back at the Luchuan battlefield, neither the Ming army nor the Luchuan army has the ability to carry out long-distance combat support in the entire Luchuan battlefield, so the entire battlefield is actually fragmented and separated.

According to the irresponsible analysis of some people on the surface: the Ming army has an army of more than 100,000 people, while the Luchuan army has only tens of thousands of people in Jiangtou City and only tens of thousands in the Mengyang area, and the Ming army has an advantage in the face of them.

The Ming army went all the way from Mengyang to Luchuan and won the victory, and later failed to break through Jiangtou City, completely defeated the Luchuan forces, and won a victory in the real sense, indicating that the real combat effectiveness of the Ming army was unbearable, or it was not enough to adapt to the environment of Luchuan, and could only rely on the numerical advantage to gain an advantage in the early stage of the war, and once it entered the hinterland of Luchuan, when the numerical advantage was not enough to support the victory of the war, it was difficult for the Ming army to make progress.

This statement is extremely unfair and extremely irresponsible. Because first of all, the Ming army's hundreds of thousands of troops were the number at the time of departure, and they had to face a lot of losses in the war. The Mengyang area is the core area of Luchuan, its geographical scope is quite broad, north to the southern foot of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau of the Assam Kingdom, south to the Ava Kingdom, there are a large number of towns and villages, the Ming army can not achieve effective control of such a vast area in a short period of time, can only occupy the main stronghold in the initial attack. For example, Mengyang City, and some important camps near Mengyang City.

However, it should be noted that even if they occupy these main camps, they ostensibly control the Mengyang area to a certain extent, but in essence, the Mengyang area outside these main strongholds is still in the hands of the Luchuan forces. The Ming army actually fought twice in Mengyang, the first and the second time, they had to face tens of thousands of Luchuan soldiers, which means that the Luchuan soldiers in the Mengyang area may be twice as numerous.

In the process of the war, the Ming army will also have a large amount of losses, which are difficult to make up, which is related to the gradual deterioration of the guard system in the Yingzong era, and the deserters have become more and more, and there are not enough troops to support; The second is that the Ming Dynasty itself does not have, or does not support a larger number of troop mobilization, and the initial 130,000 people that can be mobilized is already the limit, and it does not have the ability to effectively replenish the troops in the future.

With the war, the number of the Ming army continued to decrease, and the Battle of Luchuan was not a short war, it involved a vast area, and a long time, that is to say, except for the initial time, to the later, the Ming army did not have so much military strength in total, and it was unreliable to compare the total number of 130,000 military strength.

Secondly, the military strength of the Ming army was scattered, and all the Ming troops, especially in the later stage of the war, when they penetrated deep into the hinterland of Luchuan, the total number of Ming troops was less than 130,000 people, scattered from Mengyang to Jiangtoucheng, and there was a considerable distance between these Ming troops, especially the army located in the rear of Mengyangcheng, and the army near Jiangtoucheng, there may be more than two days of travel.

In the ancient war environment, this kind of travel and distance is equivalent to the fact that the Ming army in these two places is actually two different armies, and it is difficult to support each other.

That is to say, although the Ming army has a large number of people, the military deployment is scattered, and every scattered battlefield is located. The Luchuan army was more numerous than the Ming army. The biggest irrationality of the war situation at that time is that every time the entire Ming army is compared with the Luchuan army on part of the battlefield.

For example, taking the initial total number of the Ming army, 130,000 people, to compare the 100,000 Luchuan soldiers and civilians in Jiangtou City, it seems to be an advantage, but when the Ming army was under Jiangtou City, the remaining troops were already about 70,000 or 80,000 people, and there was no numerical advantage in the face of Jiangtou City.

What's even more ridiculous is that the total number of Ming troops is compared with the number of Luchuan troops in Mengyangcheng, with Jiang Yugang's current view, there are 40,000 Luchuan troops attacking Mengyangcheng, and the total number of Ming troops is 130,000.