Zhao Hao's campaign deployment was to take Jiangling's Seventh Army as the main force to attack Jingmen and Yicheng along the main road, and then press on Xiangyang. The Sixth Army stationed in Ezhou went out of Hanyang, went north along Zhangshui, attacked Hanchuan, Yingcheng, Anzhou, and Suizhou, and joined forces with the Seventh Army to attack Xiangfan, seize Nanyang, and then use the natural barrier formed by the mountains to establish a defensive line on the line of Funiu Mountain and Tongbai Mountain to control Huaixi.

The two divisions and the local armies that coordinated the operation mobilized a total of more than 100,000 troops, and Jiang Cheng commanded the operation in a unified manner. The Huaixi side focused on Xiangfan. Needless to say, the significance of occupying Xiangfan is needless to say, Xiangyang and Fancheng are interdependent on each other with the Han River in the north and south, "crossing Jingyu and controlling the north and south", known as the thoroughfare of the nine provinces, and the Xiangfan area is the passage from Jianghan to the Central Plains, whether it is along the Han River directly downstream, or through Suizhou, it must pass through here.

And the terrain of Xiangfan is very dangerous, since ancient times it has been a battleground for soldiers, and it was also a border town of the Song Dynasty to resist the Mongol army, and it has always been a threat to the nascent Zhao Yu regime. However, from Xiangyang to the north, follow the Xichuan and other Hanshui tributaries to go up, cross the Funiu Mountain, you can enter the Yiluo River Valley, and then, or take Luoyang in the east, or attack the key points in the west, you can make use of your strengths and avoid weaknesses and make a difference.

However, he had been unable to capture it before, so Zhao Hao had to deploy heavy troops in Ezhou, and through a series of small battles in two years, he captured Hanyang and Yiling, and formed an Ezhou inland river army to prevent the invasion of Mengyuan. If this battle is successful, not only will the defensive posture of Jiangnan be fundamentally reversed, but it will also lay a solid foundation for further passing through Sichuan and Shu. On the other hand, going north can threaten Henan and open the passage to the Central Plains.

The Second Army stationed in Wuhu planned to attack Luzhou first along the main road and then occupy Shouzhou. Shouzhou has the control of Huaiying, with the river Tuo, for the northwest of the hub, the southeast of the barrier said. Due to its geographical location on the south bank of the Huai River, the river network is dense, and its traffic role became increasingly prominent in the late Tang Dynasty. Second, Shouzhou, as a strategic location, is located in the transition zone between the Central Plains and the Jiangnan region, which can play a military role in shielding Huainan in wartime, and has also become a must-attack place.

After the Battle of Yangzhou, Zhao Hao's next target was Shanyang in Huai'an and Xuyi. Faced with the division of troops, he planned to take a boat north along the canal to reach Shanyang, and the other way to enter Xuyi by land. At present, the main battlefield of the battle between the two armies is Jiangdong, so it is necessary to quickly capture the two places and prevent the enemy's reinforcements from moving south.

Nowadays, a large number of heavy boats are concentrated under the city of Yangzhou, and they can go north day and night by boat, and they can reach Shanyang directly in less than five days. However, the other part had to march to Xuyi on foot, and it would take ten days at the earliest, but it was possible that the enemy reinforcements would arrive first, so there would be a hole in the battle line, so he began to think about how to speed up the march and seize the place before the enemy reinforcements arrived. And his idea was hit by a large number of captured war horses......

In the eyes of modern people, the cavalry is "a man's romance", and countless military fans have had the same dream - leading a cavalry to rush left and right in front of the two armies, rampage, and make immortal feats, and Zhao Yu is of course no exception. However, when he came to this world, he found that this was not the case, and that the cavalry did not dominate the battlefield by virtue of frontal charge, which resembled the bravery of a horseman, but by the dominance of the battlefield due to its great mobility.

In the era of cold weapons, the cavalry became a well-deserved master of the battlefield, as Engels said: "No army can expect victory without a cavalry capable of fighting well." Zhao Yu was deeply convinced, he realized that when the war reached a certain scale, the importance of command became more and more prominent, and when the two armies faced each other, the side with better command could often win the final victory.

However, because the process of command activities is "reconnaissance-communication-decision-communication", if you want to conduct successful command, you need to understand the battlefield situation in real time and issue orders in a timely manner, in other words, you need to have sufficient capabilities to obtain and transmit battlefield information. The stronger side of the cavalry not only has an advantage in this regard, but can also destroy the opponent's ability to obtain and transmit information.

In the era of cold weapons, the acquisition and transmission of battlefield information mainly relied on light cavalry. The light cavalry conducts reconnaissance activities, reports the detected situation to the commander-in-chief, and the commander makes a judgment on what action should be taken next based on the detected situation, and then sends the light cavalry to convey the order to the scattered troops, and each army carries out relevant actions according to the order.

In this process, whether the light cavalry can detect enough information and send it to the commander in chief and deliver the commander's orders to all armies in a timely manner has become an important factor in whether the light cavalry can take the initiative. In general, an army with more light cavalry has more information. In the course of the battle, the Mongols used their large number of light cavalry to conduct frequent reconnaissance, so that every move of the enemy army was under the control of the Mongol army, and the result was that the Mongol army could always understand the enemy's weaknesses and weaknesses, so as to launch a deadly attack on the enemy.

More importantly, when conveying information, we often have to travel through large areas of weak control, which can also become battlegrounds for both sides due to the lack of a military presence on both sides. In this battlefield, the two sides are vying for the dominance of battlefield information. Whichever side can gain the upper hand in the melee, which side can detect the situation and deliver the military orders in time. On the contrary, they will not only become deaf and blind because of poor feedback on reconnaissance intelligence, but may also paralyze the army because of poor transmission of orders. And the advantages of the light cavalry are beyond the reach of the infantry.

In this way, the mobility of the cavalry can not only help it compete for the dominance of battlefield information, but also help it seize the dominance of battlefield traffic. They can disrupt the passage of enemy supplies and destroy important bridges and roads, thus gaining control of battlefield traffic. Because from ancient times to the present, the amount of material needed to keep an army in combat has always been astronomical.

Because of the huge scale of these materials, it is impossible for the army to carry them on its own, so it often adopts two methods: special transport teams organized by the rear and small units organized by the army to collect materials around the battlefield. But both methods have their obvious weaknesses: in order to get as much food as possible to the front line, specialized convoys can no longer accompany a large army to escort them, so they are often incapable of responding to attacks; Because of their small size and small numbers, small units are weak in terms of strength, and their combat effectiveness is also low. Therefore, once a slightly larger cavalry unit uses its great mobility to search for a convoy or a small force to collect supplies, it is often more than lucky.

Because the cavalry has a speed of maneuver far beyond the infantry, it can often gain the control of the timing of the battle when facing the enemy's infantry-based army, that is, decide when and where to start the battle against the enemy, so as to be invincible. As Sun Bin summed up, "covering up its unpreparedness, attacking its unorganized brigade" and "defeating its carrying, taking it by surprise" all belong to the "ten benefits" of the cavalry.

In addition, many people who are ignorant of military affairs think that when facing a cavalry group, as long as the infantry group is always in a defensive posture or successfully camps, it does not need to worry about the attack of the cavalry group. But what they don't realize is that the above two are themselves difficult to do in the era when cavalry dominates the battlefield. It is precisely the combat state of the army in the era of cold weapons that depends heavily on whether the army can maintain sufficient physical strength and receive adequate provisions.

Furthermore, Zhao Yu knows that whether it is the era of cold weapons or modern times, it takes a certain amount of time for the army to change from a marching state to a battle formation or to set up camp to resist the enemy's attack. If you want to prepare both before the enemy cavalry arrives, you need to have enough warning time. However, the practical problem is that when one's own cavalry is at a disadvantage, the dominance of battlefield information itself is not on one's side, so it is naturally difficult to make timely warnings. Under the siege of the cavalry group, the infantry group could neither get enough rest nor adequate provisions, and naturally could only fall into defeat.

It is precisely because of the high mobility of the cavalry that it has gained various dominance in the field of campaigns, and in the tactical field it has also gained dominance in the direction of attack. When the two armies face each other, although both sides try their best to ensure that there are no weak links in their battle formations, they often leave flaws due to the constraints of their own conditions. In the face of these flaws, the cavalry group can rely on its superb mobility to quickly approach and launch an attack, and finally tear apart the entire enemy formation, so as to show the value of charging in battle.

It was precisely because of the experience of the powerful mobility of cavalry in the war that Zhao Hao pondered how to use the existing war horses to realize his plan. In order to make up for the lack of troops, he temporarily organized the cavalry of various units, but the losses in the battle were not small. And the scale is much smaller, even with the pro-guard regiment that can barely fight on horseback, it still can't undertake the task of conquering a place independently.

In addition, even if he temporarily crammed and let the infantry learn to ride a horse, Zhao Yu knew that being able to ride a horse and being able to ride a horse for a long distance were two different things, and that was not something that could be done in one day, two days, or even ten days or half a month. If nothing else, even the ass can't stand it. You can make up for it, everyone can ride a bicycle, but if you ride a hundred kilometers a day, you can't ride for three days, and the blood of your butt and thighs will obey you!

Therefore, Zhao Yu was guarding a treasure mountain, but there was no door to enter, which made him so worried that he couldn't sleep. Faced with this almost unsolvable problem, a flash of inspiration flashed in his mind, and he cursed secretly, how could he forget about them......

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