Ma Wensheng, the first assistant of the cabinet, and Wang Shu, the secretary of the ministry, were busy preparing to implement the plan.

Emperor Zhu Houzhao of Zhengde had already begun to prepare to train his own strong army.

Of course, in terms of system, all the current armies of the Ming Dynasty, regardless of their strength or weakness, nominally belong to Zhu Houzhao's army, and only Zhu Houzhao, the emperor, has the supreme command of the army.

After all, the Ming Dynasty is a dynasty with a high degree of absolute monarchy, and since it is a monarch who can be autocratic, it means that the army is only under the control of the emperor in legal theory.

This is also one of the reasons why Zhu Houzhao has been able to severely crack down on Qingliu civil officials with a high profile.

But in fact, who the Ming army belongs to is more complicated.

The main military system of the Ming Dynasty was mainly the Tuntian system of the guard, and the source of soldiers was mainly the hereditary military household of the household registration system.

Before the conscription system was introduced, most of the military households were actually peasants, tenant farmers of the officers of the guards, and they were not soldiers at all!

However, the soldiers who really have combat effectiveness are all the officers' families, the officers' private slaves, and they only listen to the officers' own dispatches, because their salaries and supplies are all provided by the officers' privates, but on the surface they are still soldiers of the imperial court.

In many cases, these officers were military landlords, or even a kind of miniature warlords, and the military households were their tenant farmers, and the family members were their guards, and they and his family and tenant farmers formed the military system of the Ming Dynasty.

Therefore, strictly speaking, apart from the regimental battalion and the forbidden soldiers, Zhu Houzhao does not have his own army.

But there is no doubt that the combat effectiveness of the regimental battalion and the forbidden army is very weak, after all, the world has been peaceful for a long time, and the status of the warriors is low, and these officers and soldiers who really belong to Zhu Houzhao have long been worn out under the double oppression of civilian officials and ministers.

Zhu Houzhao has no way to change the system of guards now, after all, if he abolishes the system now, it means that he will deprive all officers in the world of the privilege of legally enslaving military households, which will provoke the resistance of all military landlords in the world.

Therefore, now, if Zhu Houzhao wants to train his own strong army, the only thing he can do is to train the regiment and battalion and ban the soldiers.

In the eighteenth year of Hongzhi, Zhu Houzhao took advantage of the opportunity of the regimental camp and the forbidden army to make up for the lack of Lu rice and gathered the military heart of the regimental camp and the forbidden soldiers, and it was precisely because of this that he was able to rely on this army to reorganize the Jinyi Guard and successfully destroy Wang Yue, Liu Jian, Li Dongyang, Xie Qian and other rebels.

But now, this army has not been improved in terms of combat effectiveness, and there are even many redundant personnel, and many of the officers of this army are also princes and nobles who are waiting for death, and many of them can no longer pull bows and horses, especially the younger generation.

In order to reorganize and train this army, the first thing Zhu Houzhao should do is to eliminate redundant personnel, especially officers and men at the grassroots level.

However, the most difficult thing in the redundant layoffs is not the layoffs, but the problem of resettlement after the layoffs; after all, these officers and men also have to support their families, and Zhu Houzhao can prevent them from serving as soldiers, but he cannot let them have no hope of surviving.

For this reason, Zhu Houzhao specially summoned Xu Jin, a scholar of Wuyingdian University and a scholar of the Ministry of War, to discuss this matter, and according to Xu Jin's suggestion, it is best to give these officers and soldiers the land to be converted into civilian nationality, so that they can become real homesteaders, and pay grain as errands!

But the problem is that how much land in the world can be divided into ownerless fields, and before the acres of land are cleared, it is not clear that the household department only relies on the fish scale book and the yellow book that have not been recreated for many years.

Zhu Houzhao thought to himself that since it was impossible to turn these redundant members of the army into yeoman farmers for a while, it was better to become workers, in short, it was better to organize them into his own army of workers as the emperor and let these redundant people create their own value through labor through engineering construction.

Therefore, Zhu Houzhao simply did not lay off these redundant personnel and decided to organize them into engineering troops.

Of course, the engineering troops here are not exactly the same as the engineering troops of later generations, at least they do not have the technical skills of the engineering troops of later generations, and the engineering troops that Zhu Houzhao is going to organize now are more just workers who carry out engineering construction.

In addition, Zhu Houzhao also decided to unify these engineers into civilian nationality in the future, and allowed them to apply for retirement from the army to engage in other professions.

After all, although Zhu Houzhao could not immediately abolish the hereditary military registration system, it was still possible to convert some military households to civilian registration, especially the regiments and battalions and forbidden soldiers in the capital.

However, Zhu Houzhao could not tell the regimental battalion and the forbidden soldiers about his idea yet, because he believed that as long as the officers and soldiers of the regimental battalion and the forbidden soldiers knew about it, the soldiers among these officers and soldiers would definitely want to change to civilian nationality, after all, people in this era knew that civilian households were freer than military households.

At first, Zhu Houzhao just ordered the regimental battalion and the forbidden soldiers to be combined into the Ming Guards!

The main responsibility of these two armies is to garrison the capital and the palace of the guards, and the combination of the guards naturally integrates the meaning of protecting the emperor and the stability of the capital, and it is also good to carry out unified training and training.

At the beginning, Zhu Houzhao asked Xu Jin, the secretary of the military department, to recount the actual number of the Ming Guards, and re-screened, and finally screened out only nearly 70,000 sharp soldiers.

Compared with the 100,000 elite soldiers selected by Yu Qian from the three major battalions during the Jingtai period, this number is naturally much less, but for Zhu Houzhao, if 70,000 sharp soldiers are trained into strong soldiers, it is not too little.

Zhu Houzhao asked the military department and the imperial horse supervisor to reorganize the 70,000 sharp soldiers into nearly seven armies.

Each army is still commanded by the commander, while those below the army are modeled after the Qi family's army, flags, divisions, bureaus, and battalions, with three battalions in each army, three divisions in each battalion, three flags in each division, and three teams in each flag, with twelve people in each team.

In this way, it is good to directly according to the establishment of the Qi family's army, and the officers of the Guards are distributed according to their official positions in the regimental battalion and the forbidden army.

However, if we rashly and directly use the modern military establishment, it is easy to lead to confusion in the organization.

The formation of the Guards is only the beginning, and the training of the Guards is the most important thing.

However, training 70,000 people is not a small project, even if Zhu Houzhao is a traverser, he has experienced two military trainings, or he can train one or two people according to the gourd painting, but it does not mean that he can directly train 70,000 people.

However, he brought in an officer who was good at training an army of 70,000, and this person was Qiu Yue, a guerrilla general in Ningxia.

In the early days of Zhengde, Zhu Houzhao's deepest impression of the military attache was this Qiu Yue.

In the original history, this person had the record of quelling the rebellion of Zhu Ningjiao, the king of Anhua, on the 18th, and later quelled many rebellions, and finally won the title of Lord Xianning, which shows that his military ability is very strong.

After all, it is not easy to get a knighthood in the Ming Dynasty, especially to obtain a knighthood by military merits, generally this kind of person is a person with strong military ability, and Qiu Yue is still from a military family, and has actual experience in leading troops in border towns, especially his training is undoubtedly the most suitable.

Because of this, Zhu Houzhao chose to summon Qiu Yue into Beijing, preparing to let him train the guards for him.

Qiu Yue's loyalty is naturally credible, after all, in the original history, Zhu Ninghua, the king of Anhua, rebelled, and he did not betray the court, let alone the rebellion of Zhu Ningyao, the king of Anhua.

However, Qiu Yue has not yet started to train the Guards, because the reorganization of the Guards has not yet ended, and in the era of mixed use of hot and cold weapons in the Ming Dynasty, it will take time to reasonably allocate troops in the reorganization process.

Now Qiu Yue is working as an instructor at Beijing Normal University, and he is training Zhu Houzhao, Wang Yangming, Yan Song and several other literati, as well as a group of noble children.