The Fifth Infantry Brigade is a new main brigade unit that began to be built after the Tang Dynasty moved its capital to Zhaoqing, and the source of the brigade is expected to be mainly recruited locally in Guangdong, but the brigade only exists on paper for the time being.

The expansion of the Tang Dynasty has never stopped, and the expansion of the regular army of the Tang Dynasty is not limited by the source of soldiers, but by the production of weapons, especially guns.

The 6th Infantry Regiment and the 4th Infantry Brigade are very typical examples, the 6th Infantry Regiment has been fully staffed for a long time, but it has not been able to wait for the guns that should be available, and can only be equipped with cold weapons.

However, the Sixth Infantry Regiment, which is trained with firearms units, to be honest, is not as effective as any garrison regiment under the Third Garrison Brigade when using pure cold weapons, let alone the heavy infantry regiment of the Liuzhou Independent Regiment.

However, although these troops do not have guns and other equipment, and their combat effectiveness has shrunk greatly, the recruitment of new recruits in the Tang Dynasty will not stop, and the recruited recruits will naturally be used to form new troops in addition to supplementing the existing troops.

In addition to the urgent need to expand the army, the establishment of the Fifth Infantry Brigade is also related to the soldiers themselves.

Because the recruits recruited by the military department cannot be replenished indiscriminately, because there will be language barriers, and even different living habits.

This difference has caused great trouble for the army units of the Tang Dynasty Division to replenish the troops!

Many units are replenished with recruits that can only be recruited in fixed areas.

At present, it is said that the soldiers recruited in Guizhou are basically only supplemented to the units under the Second Army, especially the Second Infantry Brigade, and all Guizhou soldiers are uniform, while if the Guangxi soldiers go to serve in this unit, they are basically not accustomed to the soil and water and have different languages.

The soldiers recruited in Guangxi were divided into two categories, one was the Chinese recruits, who were supplemented by the Fourth Infantry Brigade, and the ordinary Han recruits, who were supplemented by the Third Infantry Brigade and the First Infantry Brigade.

Among them, the source of recruits in the First Army is more complicated, at first they were all Guizhou soldiers, and later as the war progressed, after a large number of wounded appeared, a large number of Guangxi Han soldiers were supplemented, resulting in a situation where basically half of the First Army were Guizhou soldiers and half were Guangxi soldiers.

In order to completely solve this problem, the military department recruits new recruits, the training department trains new recruits, and the operations department replenishes new recruits, often grouping the recruits according to the same county and the same prefecture.

Therefore, this situation occurs in many troops, where the soldiers in a team are often in the same county, and the troops in a battalion are often in the same prefecture, and it is rare to say that there are soldiers from different counties in a team at the same time.

Although this will inevitably lead to the phenomenon of mountaineering, Li Xuan is not stupid, so he naturally prevented this from happening from the beginning, and this precaution is the literacy class in the army.

Originally, Li Xuan wanted to directly use the Mandarin of later generations, but considering that today's Nanjing Mandarin is the standard Mandarin of the land of China, let alone others, even Li Xuan and Liu Bagou used this Nanjing Mandarin for their conversations.

There is no way, all the scholars in the world communicate in Nanjing official dialect, if you Li Xuan suddenly come up with a Yuan Dynasty North. After the fusion of Beijing dialect and Nanjing official dialect, who can understand this bird language in the world except for Li Xuan......

In this literacy class, literacy and Mandarin are taught, and Mandarin is forcibly promoted in the army, so that many veterans who have served for a long time can speak some simple Mandarin.

After these soldiers can speak official dialect, there will be no need to worry about different languages in the future, and then Li Xuan can play mixed editing.

The difference in language and living habits caused great trouble when the Tang Dynasty division organized various troops, on the contrary, the Ming army would not have this kind of problem, because their Weisuo army was originally a Tuntian army, and the soldiers were all in the same place.

Even if it is a recruitment, it is a recruitment of soldiers from one place and one is sent to the battlefield, and there is basically no problem of piecemeal supplementation.

But the Tang Dynasty is not good, because the Tang Dynasty's unit number is fixed, and the personnel must be replenished after the loss of the troops in battle.

Obviously, the soldiers recruited in the Guangdong area cannot be replenished to other units, except for a part that can be replenished to the First Army, the rest are used to form new units, and this is the source of the Fifth Infantry Brigade.

Recently, after the situation in Guangdong initially stabilized, Li Xuan asked the Training Department to extend the training time for recruits of the Fifth Infantry Brigade from one month to two months.

This time, Li Xuan was determined to rebuild a new main force, a main force that could be compared to the First Infantry Brigade.

Because of the previous many army expansion operations, whether it was the Second Infantry Brigade, the Third Infantry Infantry Brigade, or the Fourth Infantry Brigade, they were all in a hurry, and many soldiers in the unit were trained for less than a month to supplement the troops to fight.

Although it is said that after these recruits enter the army, they can continue to train, and they can be tempered in the process of combat, and grow into a veteran faster.

However, under such circumstances, the combat effectiveness of the recruits is not strong enough, which will not only cause the casualty rate of these recruits to be relatively large, but more importantly, the combat effectiveness of the troops cannot be improved.

Troop casualties need to be controlled, and combat effectiveness needs to be improved.

Taking advantage of the fact that Guangdong has now been taken, there is still a First Army in Guangdong, and the situation is relatively calm, Li Xuan decided to prepare for the establishment of the Fifth Infantry Brigade as the main force.

The recruits who were scheduled to be recruited for the brigade were recruited one after another and then entered the recruit camp for training, which lasted only a few days for a short period of time and a month for a month.

In another month, the first batch of soldiers who have completed basic training will be able to enter service in the 5th Infantry Brigade.

In order to ensure the smooth formation of the Fifth Infantry Brigade and its considerable combat effectiveness after it became an army, Li Xuan had even prepared weapons for them in advance, not to mention cold weapons, many cold weapons of the Ming army were captured in the Tang Dynasty.

Although it is said that in general, many of them have to be used by the garrison, but the main force will not lack these cold weapons, even cold weapons such as armor can be fully rationed.

As for guns, he also prepared them in advance, especially the new weapons created in Wuzhou, Zhaoqing and other places, which will be given priority to the brigade.

In the next three months, we will strive to make the Fifth Infantry Brigade officially formed into an army and become a combat force.

Then, together with the First Infantry Brigade, it supported a new round of expansion of the Tang Dynasty.

After arriving in Zhaoqing, in addition to ordinary government affairs and imperial examinations, in addition to caring about other aspects of combat in the military, he spent most of his time on the preparation of the Fifth Infantry Brigade.

The first batch of recruits has not yet arrived, and he has already asked the Privy Council to start selecting officers at all levels from the whole army, as well as transferring senior non-commissioned officers.

Li Xuan naturally didn't care about the appointment of those middle and low-level officers, but he still personally grasped the appointment of senior officers, including the brigade commander, deputy brigade commander, brigade chief of staff, and two regiment commanders, especially the selection of the brigade commander is the most important, because according to the current physique of the Tang Dynasty's division, it is often an infantry brigade with several garrison brigades to form a corps, and the brigade commander of the infantry brigade is also the commander of the army.

The brigade commander of the Fifth Infantry Brigade will also be the commander of the Fifth Army, and at present, there are only a handful of people who can be qualified for this position, and most of them are already army commanders.

When the Fifth Infantry Brigade had not yet been formed, Li Xuan was unable to continue to expand the main force, and at that time, the strength was tight, and he had to reuse the garrison again.

This garrison that Li Xuan plans to reuse is the Third Garrison Brigade.

The brigade performed well in the Battle of Wuzhou, and its combat effectiveness can be called an ace force in a large number of garrisons in the Tang Army, and Li Xuan is ready to continue to strengthen the strength of the brigade.

It is not expected that the garrison brigade should have the same strength as a regular infantry brigade, but at least it must be able to undertake independent combat missions on the secondary front.

Therefore, he planned to strengthen the Third Garrison Brigade to a certain extent, and this reinforcement naturally could not be to equip this unit with muskets, because the Third Garrison Brigade is a typical cold-weapon unit, although the establishment number looks the same as that of the regular army, but the daily training and tactics are completely different from the regular army.

Even if they were given muskets, it was not necessarily better than they were to use bows and arrows.

Therefore, Li Xuan's reinforcement of the Third Garrison Brigade is to improve the quality of the cold weapons they are equipped with.

In the past, many cold weapons in the Tang Dynasty were of good quality and were given priority to equip the regular army, and the garrison was generally equipped with cold weapons that the regular army did not want.

Even the Third Garrison Brigade was the same, and this time Li Xuan decided to equip them with cold weapons of the same quality as the regular army.

For example, the waist knives of ordinary light-armored swords and shields are no longer the rusty iron knives of the past, but are equipped with iron-clad steel-clad waist knives, and the waist knives of heavy-armored swords and shields are also replaced with all-steel knives.

They were equipped with enough heavily armored sword and shield soldiers and heavily armored spearmen.

Bows and arrows were also replaced to a certain extent, and some poor quality bows were replaced with standard bows.

In the end, after careful consideration, Li Xuan decided to assign this infantry brigade to a shotgun team, although the third garrison brigade is a traditional cold weapon unit, it is inconvenient to use muskets, but it is possible to use artillery, and the Ming army also uses artillery.

And these artillery pieces are simply from the bowl mouth cannons captured from the Ming army.

In addition, a small cavalry unit was additionally assigned to the brigade, with a baggage regiment of about 2,000 men.

In this way, the strength of the brigade will skyrocket to nearly 9,000 troops, and it will become a force with comprehensive and independent combat capability.

After the brigade is strengthened, the brigade commander Cai Erhu's military rank will also be upgraded to the rank of major general.

Li Xuan just wanted to tell the officers of the garrison units below that even if they served in the garrison, they would have the opportunity to be promoted, or even squeeze into the general rank.

After the reorganization and reinforcement of the Third Garrison Brigade, it will be completely changed, and Li Xuan is quite looking forward to the performance of the Third Garrison Brigade, and even the combat mission arranged for it is not to reinforce Guizhou, nor to go to Guangxi, but to go south to Guangzhou, and it is expected to cooperate with the First Army to seize Guangzhou and completely bring the whole of Guangdong into the rule of the Tang Dynasty.

It can also be seen from this that even if Guizhou is already facing a major crisis, and even Liuzhou is facing a crisis, Li Xuan still has not stopped seizing the entire Guangdong and separating the strategic determination of the two Guangzhous!

He would rather lose the entire Guizhou and even the Second Army, but also completely take Liangguang!