Li Xuan was very clear about the difficulties faced by going north to Huguang, which was also the reason why Li Xuan resolutely suppressed the troops in the first few months to continue to attack the north, but let them rest and reorganize.

If you continue to launch an offensive in the first few months, it is true that you can capture the city and kill and injure a lot of Ming troops, but the troops in the north are already at the end of the crossbow, and many troops are not satisfied, and there is a relative lack of artillery and muskets, which can achieve a temporary victory is certain, but it is easy to have an accident after the offensive force is exhausted.

What if the troops going north are exhausted and tens of thousands of Ming troops come out to kill them?

Don't think that this kind of thing is impossible, this kind of thing is actually very likely, and the Ming army is not stupid, after suffering so many defeats, no matter how stupid the Ming army generals are, they can't fight hard with the pseudo-Tang thief army.

Now the Ming army in Huguang and even in Fujian and Jiangxi is already smart, and it will never fight with the puppet Tang thief army in the field unless it is absolutely necessary, even if it is to fight, at most it is to concentrate superior forces to ambush.

Just like the ambush of the headquarters of the Second Army outside the city of Xingquanfu, that battle was also one of the few and only victories in many field battles between the Ming army and the Tang army.

Even the casualties of the Ming army at the beginning exceeded that of the Tang army, but whether from a strategic or tactical point of view, the Ming army at that time was considered a victory.

In addition to concentrating superior forces to fight ambushes, the favorite thing for the generals of the Ming army now is to defend the city, wait for the puppet Tang thief army to take the initiative to attack, and use the fortified city to offset the firearms advantage of the puppet Tang thief army, and at the same time be able to buy time for the rear.

Because even with the combat effectiveness of the Tang Army, it is not easy to conquer a city that the Ming Army is strictly defending.

Either it costs a lot of casualties, or it takes a lot of time.

And these are all things that the Ming army is happy to see.

Based on the above difficulties, Li Xuancai suspended the continuous offensive on the Huguang front, and instead allowed the troops to start recuperating and equipping the troops with more firearms, especially the artillery used in the siege.

Through several months of hard work, the Tang Dynasty has preliminarily completed the task of reorganizing six infantry divisions, five temporary regiments, and two mixed regiments, from infantry to artillery to baggage.

Even because the recruits are still training and replenishing the troops, Li Xuan even set up three supplementary brigades, the biggest task of this supplementary brigade is to continue to train the recruits who have just come out of the recruit camp, and provide reinforcement for the main force on the front line at any time.

The first supplementary brigade was deployed in Shaozhou, Guangdong, the second supplementary brigade was deployed in Lipingfu, Guizhou, and the third supplementary brigade was deployed in Liuzhoufu, Guangxi.

The soldiers of this supplementary brigade are all recruits who have just completed recruit training, and there are no other backbone veterans in addition to the officers and non-commissioned officers who serve as instructors, and to some extent, this is an advanced version of the recruit training camp.

This kind of supplementary brigade does not undertake the main combat mission on weekdays, at most it is stationed in the rear, covering the supply lines, suppressing bandits, and so on, unless the front-line army is defeated, otherwise they will not go to the battlefield.

Most of their equipment is also second-line equipment, although it is said that swords, spears, bows and arrows, and even muskets and artillery are available, but they are all second-line equipment, most of the artillery is captured from the Ming army's bowl cannons, general cannons, muskets are all old muskets used in the first-line troops, armor is even more good, and most of the swords and spears are not of good quality.

The only thing worth mentioning is that although this kind of supplementary brigade is called a brigade, it is actually more numerous than an infantry brigade, but it is fully armed, and it is simply a reduced version of an infantry division, or a mixed brigade.

Specifically, it has jurisdiction over two supplementary regiments, a baggage regiment, an artillery battalion, a cavalry battalion, and various auxiliary units, and if it is fully established, the number of troops will probably reach nearly 10,000.

But not only are the soldiers all recruits, but even those grassroots officers are mostly rookie officers who have just graduated from the martial arts academy.

This kind of supplementary brigade, in fact, to a certain extent, is a flexible choice made by Li Xuan in order to make the training time of recruits too little now, but the strength is tight and the time is even tighter.

At present, the recruits in the recruit camp only have one month of basic training time, and this time is actually not enough for a soldier to complete all the training, so after the existing divisions and regiments have completed the reorganization, Li Xuan has begun to improve the training time of soldiers.

It is not advisable to directly increase the training time in the recruit camp, because the Tang Dynasty does not have enough time for the recruits to train for three months before going to the battlefield, especially when the large-scale battle of Huguang in the north is imminent.

So it came up with the supplementary brigade, which is half a new battalion and half a regular army.

Starting from October of the second year of Xuanping, the process of recruiting and training soldiers in the Tang Dynasty will change, taking the army as an example, the Ministry of War directly under the cabinet will first recruit qualified soldiers from the jurisdiction, and there are several mandatory requirements for soldiers, such as requiring that the height must reach 1.5 meters, lift 80 pounds, march 15 miles in an hour, be healthy, have no diseases, be over 16 years old, and not exceed 25 years old.

In addition, there is a hard condition, that is, the military must be the son of a farmer, the son of a rich family, a city dweller, or even the children of other industries, and the net worth must be innocent, not a green-skinned hooligan, and there must also be a guarantee from any of the three people: the local village chief, the patrol sergeant, and the tax officer.

The above-mentioned articles can basically brush down half of the 100 young and middle-aged people, and one of the guarantee regulations is enough to brush down any non-peasant family, because the children of the city cannot find a village chief to guarantee them, because there is no such administrative system as a village in the city, let alone a village head.

In fact, after more than a year of recruitment, the qualified soldiers in Guangxi, eastern Guangdong, southeastern Guizhou, and central Guizhou in the three provinces and regions are basically running out.

However, the Tang Dynasty is still continuing to expand externally, and there will always be new recruits.

After these recruits are successfully selected, they are picked up by civilian officers in the War Department, and then organized into platoons, squads, battalions, etc., based on the administrative establishment of the town and county, and then handed over to the Privy Council Training Division.

The training department will send these selected recruits to the new barracks in various places, and there are currently three new barracks in Guangdong, three in Guangxi, and two in Guizhou.

In the new barracks, they will first undergo nutritional supplements, physical training, queue training, training in basic combat skills, and at the same time receive basic cultural courses, mainly to learn the official dialect of the Ming Dynasty, but also to learn some simple common words and arithmetic.

After completing one month of basic training, they are divided into detailed classes according to their personal wishes, talents, and learning abilities, such as musketeers, spearmen, sword and shield soldiers, archers, baggage soldiers, engineers, artillery, cavalry, etc.

After that, they will be sent to the local supplementary brigade to continue training, where they can conduct live-fire training, and can imitate the combat of the regular army, and even occasionally have real combat missions: suppressing bandits, suppressing rebellions, escorting convoys, etc.

The training time in the supplementary brigade varies, with the infantry and baggage and engineer men having the shortest time, and after completing two months of training in the supplementary brigade, they can wait to be assigned to the main forces.

And ordinary artillery belongs to the technical branch, so the study period will be extended to three months.

As for the cavalry and archers, this is not possible, because these two arms have too high requirements for personal ability, and they can't train a cavalry or archer in just a few months, so although the training time of these two arms is only three months, if it is not for the large-scale casualties of the cavalry and archers of the front-line troops and the urgent need to replenish, this training time should be extended by two months.

After all, the cavalry generals on the front line did not want to have only a novice cavalry under their men who had just learned to ride a horse and could not even follow the charge of a large army.

If the supplementary brigades are also included, then the training of recruits in the Datang Army is now relatively regular, and the training time for non-technical arms is three months, that for ordinary technical arms is four months, and for high-tech arms is six months.

Such a long training period can only be achieved now when the situation is relatively stable and there is no large-scale threat from the outside.

If it weren't for the completion of the task of reorganizing six divisions and a number of temporary regiments and mixed regiments, Li Xuan would not have done this.

The only Li Xuan thought that if the losses of the follow-up front-line troops were not large, the training time of the supplementary brigade could continue to be extended, and when the time came, after a year and a half of training, and then some officers and non-commissioned officers from the old army were transferred to serve as the backbone, who would dare to say that these supplementary brigades could not go directly to the battlefield?

Even if the training is not completed, they can still perform some simple tasks in the rear, and when the situation is urgent, they can directly pull it up to fight, which is much better than training in the boot camp for several months.

This can be regarded as a way for Li Xuan to expand the army.

For example, after the First Supplementary Brigade sits in Shaozhou Mansion, the First Infantry Division, the absolute main force of the Tang Dynasty, can immediately free up its hands and then launch a northward operation.