Because the recruits of the Fifth Infantry Regiment will not be recruited in Xingquan Province, but in Liping Province, at present, the many recruitment stations of the Ministry of War in Liping Province have recruited about 2,000 recruits for the Datang New Army, and now these recruits are all in the two recruit training camps under the Privy Council Training Department for basic physical fitness and tactical training.

It is expected that in half a month, the Training Division will be able to deliver the first batch of hundreds of recruits who have completed basic training to the Fifth Infantry Regiment, and within a month, the Training Division will be able to provide the Fifth Infantry Regiment with full troops!

Not only are the recruits in Liping Province, but the Fifth Infantry Regiment will also be stationed in Liping Province in the next few months, so Zhou Yibao and the others naturally need to leave for Liping Province.

Accompanying Zhou Yibao and them were the Fourth Infantry Regiment, which had just been fully staffed and had just received a batch of ordnance.

The 4th Infantry Regiment was also a new unit, but unlike the other four infantry regiments, only one battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment was a regular battalion, and the remaining two battalions were garrison battalions.

The 10th Infantry Battalion under the jurisdiction of the 4th Infantry Regiment was already full, and although there were only 100 muskets, they could barely fight, and the insufficient part would be discussed later.

In addition, the two garrison battalions, which were already complete, were already considered to have preliminary combat effectiveness, and they could go to Liping Mansion in advance to prepare for the follow-up battle against the Ming army in the provincial capital.

The 4th Infantry Regiment and the 5th Infantry Regiment marched to Liping Province one after another, so that only one Third Infantry Regiment and one personal guard battalion remained in the huge Xingquan Province.

And these two troops, Li Xuan doesn't plan to move for the time being!

On the one hand, the 3rd Infantry Regiment had not actually been expanded, and earlier in the past, the 1st and 2nd Infantry Regiments had been given priority in the supply of personnel and ordnance, even to the 10th Infantry Battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment.

Therefore, it will take some time for the 3rd Infantry Regiment to be expanded, so that it can be truly fully equipped.

Aside from this factor, it is also related to Li Xuan himself.

As the emperor, Li Xuan always has to leave a force around him to prevent it, but now there are enemies all around, and there are no two or three thousand people around him, Li Xuan is not at ease.

Besides, the east of Xingquan Mansion is Huguang, although Li Xuan does not plan to go to Huguang, the mountain road that Huguang wants to come over is difficult to travel, but who knows if the officials over there in Huguang will be dizzy, and then send troops to kill it, so they have to leave a force to guard their hometown and the basic plate of Xingquan Mansion.

However, even if the expansion plan of the Fifth Infantry Regiment has been determined, for the Datang New Army, the gap in strength is still very large.

There's no way, who let the Tang Dynasty be surrounded by enemies, southeast and west, as far as the eye can see, it is all the territory of the Dameng Dynasty, and there are Ming troops in all directions, not to mention Guizhou Province, there is Guangxi over there, and Huguang in the east.

Among them, the army assembled by Zhu Zhihai, the governor of Guizhou, is said to be as high as more than 50,000 people, which is too great for the new army of the Tang Dynasty, which has less than 10,000 troops and only 10,000 or 2,000 people.

Therefore, the new army of Datang, especially the high-level people, never forget to expand the army.

No, the Fifth Infantry Regiment has just decided on its formation plan, and there is not even a single soldier yet, and the Operations Division has already put forward the idea of forming a new unit, proposing to form the Sixth Infantry Regiment to deal with the huge Ming army.

Seeing this plan, Li Xuan threw it aside without even thinking about it!

Also expand the army?

What are you kidding, now the source of troops on the side of Xingquan Mansion can be said to be close to exhaustion, recruiting nearly 8,000 soldiers from a population of more than 300,000, which is almost all the qualified soldiers, even if there are population resources on the side of Liping Mansion, but at present, the new army of the Tang Dynasty has only occupied the eastern part of Liping Mansion, and even the city has not yet been taken, let alone the western region of Liping Mansion.

It is not easy to recruit thousands more qualified recruits.

And even if the soldiers are solved, the problem of ordnance is difficult to solve, the output of muskets is just like that, and now in so many troops of the Datang New Army, the first corps and the second infantry regiment are fully loaded, and the follow-up fourth infantry regiment has only one regular infantry battalion, even if the regimental grenadier team is added, the muskets required are only three hundred, but there is still a lack of two hundred guns.

As for the 3rd Infantry Regiment, there are no guns, and the 3rd Infantry Regiment currently only has 100 muskets from the original 2nd Mixed Battalion, and there is a shortage of 600 muskets.

As for the newly formed Fifth Infantry Regiment, there was not a single gun!

In this case, he came to expand the army!

At present, the workshop of the Ministry of Industry, even if it adopts the flow type of production, the current monthly output of the musket manufacturer in Zhengtai County is only more than 200, and the newly built Xingquanfu musket workshop, because of the cost and manpower, although it has just been put into production, the output has more than 200 pieces, and the two musket workshops combined, the monthly output is probably more than 400 pieces.

Although the Ministry of Industry said that the output of next month can reach 500 pieces, it will be able to reach more than 700 pieces in the next month.

But that's all for the future, who can say accurately, the current Tang Dynasty produces more than 400 muskets every month, and an infantry regiment needs about 700 muskets.

In other words, the current production of muskets in the Tang Dynasty takes nearly two months to meet the needs of an infantry regiment.

What's more, the musket is actually a consumable, whether it is training or fighting, the wear and tear of this musket is quite large, unless there is no live-fire training, and no shooting is done in battle.

Therefore, even if the production of muskets in the Tang Dynasty has doubled, it is still seriously insufficient for the demand of the new army of the Tang Dynasty.

At present, among the units of the Datang New Army, the First Infantry Corps and the Second Infantry Regiment have achieved full strength of guns and artillery, while the Third Infantry Regiment still lacks 600 muskets, the Fourth Infantry Regiment still lacks 200 muskets, and the Fifth Infantry Regiment also lacks 700 muskets.

Well, you have to count Li Xuan's personal guard battalion, the personal guard battalion is also the same as the regular battalion, with five teams, two of which are musket teams, and they are also grenadier teams, and the whole battalion needs more than 200 guns to be full, and now there are only half of them.

If you add it up like this, you will find that the shortage of firearms in the entire Datang New Army is as high as 1,600!

Well, this is not counting the daily training and combat losses of the whole army, if this part is part, it will have to be added to three or four hundred.

That is to say, just with the current scale of the Datang New Army, there is still a gap of almost 2,000 muskets, according to the current production capacity of muskets, it will take five months to meet the demand, even if the Ministry of Industry promises that the output will reach 500 next month, and the production capacity will reach 700 in the next month, but it will take more than four months to produce so many muskets.

In other words, the current Datang New Army has already covered the production capacity of muskets in the next four months, and then expand the sentence? Could it be that the soldiers were going to take a training stick to the battlefield?

However, Zeng Ziwen's words made Li Xuan find a new idea for expanding the army, Zeng Ziwen suggested that the regular infantry battalion should not continue to expand, it would be too costly.

But the army can continue to expand, they have captured a lot of cold weapons from the Ming army, and now they are piled up in the warehouse and moldy, as for the soldiers, although it is more difficult to recruit, but after the defeat of Liping Mansion, this source of soldiers must be more again.

Therefore, Zeng Ziwen suggested that the follow-up play should be used to form a unit equipped with pure cold weapons.

When Zeng Ziwen said this, Li Xuan suddenly realized, damn, why didn't Lao Tzu think that he had to get musketeers and artillery to expand the army.

Swords, shields, spearmen, etc., can be obtained, just give them a notched iron knife captured from the Ming army, rusty spears, tattered armor and pull them out, who dares to say that they are not an army?

As for the combat effectiveness, well, this doesn't seem to be too much of a problem, because Zeng Ziwen said: Even if it is a unit with pure cold weapons, it is not necessarily worse than the soldiers of the Ming army guards!

Because the pure cold weapon unit of the Datang New Army is also recruited for training after recruiting soldiers, the difference between them and the regular infantry battalion is only that they do not have muskets, not to mention, even in the regular infantry battalion, the proportion of musketeers is only half, and the remaining half are still spearmen and sword and shield soldiers.

For this reason, Li Xuan was thinking that such a cold-weapon infantry battalion, except for not being equipped with muskets, would still be trained according to the regular infantry battalion in all other aspects, and the quality of the soldiers should not be a problem.

In this way, when the production of muskets will come up in the future, and then these cold-armed infantry battalions are equipped with two hundred musketeers, then won't we soon be able to get another regular infantry battalion?

The more Li Xuan thought about it, the more excited he became, and then he discussed it with Zeng Ziwen and a group of officers of the Operations Department for three days, and then came up with a plan for preparing for the establishment of a 'reserve battalion'.

The reserve battalion, as the name suggests, is the back force of the regular battalion, and the soldiers mainly come from the newly recruited soldiers, and the reserve battalion is organized to follow the regular infantry battalion, still using a five-team system, with two spearmen, a heavy armor sword and shield team, a light armor sword and shield team, and an archer team.

Its establishment is similar to that of the garrison battalion, the only difference is that the soldiers in the garrison camp are almost all prisoners of the Ming army, while the troops in the reserve battalion are newly recruited.

The main task is to cooperate with the main force in combat, and at the same time, when the main force is damaged in battle, and the rear training division is unable to replenish the main force in time, it will transfer troops to the main force.

In this way, the expansion of the army does not have to be affected by the production of muskets and artillery at all, as for the cold weapons required by the reserve battalion, the new army of the Tang Dynasty has more of all kinds of cold weapons captured from the Ming army, although the quality is not good, but it can barely be used.

As soon as the plan for the reserve camp came out, Li Xuan waved his pen and directly planned to build ten reserve camps!

As soon as the people from the Ministry of Taxation heard that the military had come out with a plan to expand the total number of ten battalions and a total of 5,000 people a few days later, the faces of the officials in the Ministry of Taxation were like dead parents.

Ma Dan, one mouth is an expansion plan of almost 5,000 people, even if these reserve battalions don't use muskets and artillery, it's hard that they don't have to eat and drink!

Expand the army every day, you let them get so much food there!

No matter how awesome our tax inspection team is, we won't be able to loot so much grain in a short period of time!