After the outbreak of the war, China did not respond passively.

On the one hand, it quickly launched military operations, and with the experience of the last global war with Britain, it immediately dispatched the main naval force to seize the sea control in the Indian Ocean and cut off the connection between India and Britain. A powerful detachment of 50 battleships was sent to the Americas, and it was impossible to control the whole of America, but it was still possible to ensure that the west coast of the Americas was in their own hands.

With the European company using Crete as a base to break the engagement and containment, the British fleet will not be able to move as it pleases, and it will have to maintain a certain number of warships in the Mediterranean Sea and on the mainland, and the Americas will not become the main battlefield of naval warfare. This is very important, not only to ensure China's military operations in the western part of the Americas, but also to ensure its ties with the Americas.

This is the reason why the crown prince Zhu Jitong attacked Mexico City and Lima successively, but did not launch a military operation in La Plata, because Spain was supported by the British navy in La Plata.

The sea is still quite close as in the last war, and the distance makes it impossible for either side to destroy the opponent in a short time. Unlike last time, this time China not only retains control of the Suez Canal, but also has a stable base in the Mediterranean, Crete, and close ties with Greece, an emerging country in the Mediterranean. If a major war breaks out between the two sides, the Mediterranean must be a breakthrough.

The war had just begun, and the war in North America and India had not yet entered the white-hot stage, with the British army in India temporarily having an advantage, and the Chinese army in the Americas temporarily having an advantage, but neither of them was a decisive advantage, and this was a war that developed into a long-term from the beginning.

But even in the face of this situation, Zhou Lang did not mobilize.

China's current military system of soldiers and auxiliaries has not shown any shortcomings at present, and it has been relatively perfected.

The soldiers are formed according to the model of the European standing army, and they are world-class in terms of training and equipment. The officers are all officers who have graduated from regular military schools, and their professionalism and military skills are professional. The auxiliary troops have a certain local color, but they can no longer be seen on the same level as the local regimental training at the beginning, but are relatively regular troops, which can be regarded as local garrisons and garrisons.

At the beginning, the auxiliary soldiers were indeed relatively crude, no different from local regimental training, and they always had the nickname of the subordinate soldiers. With the retirement of time, the officers and veterans of the regular army gradually retired, and the retired officers and even veterans were arranged to return to their hometowns to be responsible for the training and command of the auxiliary forces. The first is to find a livelihood for these retired officers and veterans, and the second is to improve the management of auxiliary forces through them.

In the aftermath of the Crimean War a decade ago, there were already a sufficient number of retired officers and enlisted men who were able to manage and operate auxiliaries more formally, like war units. In fact, their training methods and combat methods are no different from those of the soldiers, and they are still inferior to the soldiers in terms of heavy firepower, and they are not as high as the soldiers in terms of salaries.

The number of these regularized auxiliaries was quite large, with at least one auxiliary corps in each province, numbering between 12,000 and 15,000 men. In some provinces with large populations, there are two auxiliary armies, such as Guangdong, which is divided by the Pearl River and formed two auxiliary armies, which become the left army and the right army of Guangdong; Hunan also has two armies, called the Xiangdong and Xiangxi armies; Sichuan even had three armies, three armies in northern Sichuan, western Sichuan and eastern Sichuan.

There are 40 regular auxiliaries with a total of more than 500,000 men. These 500,000 men and 300,000 soldiers are all off-duty troops that can go out at any time.

But there are also some reserve armies, which are militias with real local characteristics; The armor protection system, from the Qin Dynasty Shang Dynasty to the Han Dynasty began to abolish the law, mainly the Qin Dynasty advocated legalism, the early Han Dynasty pursued Huang Lao, and the middle period advocated Confucianism. Dynasties after the Han Dynasty have been repeated many times. The government soldier system implemented by the Tang Dynasty pushed the Tang Dynasty to a prosperous era. This government soldier system is considered by the Chinese to be a traditional armor protection system, and Westerners believe that it is a tribal soldier system derived from internal pressure. Land in exchange for service, and then as the state-owned land resources were depleted, the army began to weaken.

After the decline of the government soldiers, the lobby began to use a large number of nomadic mercenaries, for a king, the promotion of foreign talents who have no local roots as henchmen can indeed play a certain role in strengthening the imperial power, but also to deal with external challenges. But the corresponding price is a complete separation between the army and the state, between the professional samurai and the common people. Since the feudal towns in the border region successively appointed generals and mercenaries as the main force, the border army, as an independent interest group, began to operate independently from the control of the imperial power. In the end, there was a rebellion of An Lushan, the general of the Hu people, which dragged the Tang Dynasty from the clouds into the abyss.

In the west, there were Roman barbarian mercenaries, and in the end, the power fell to the sidelines, and the Roman Empire was controlled by the barbarians and finally perished. Zhou Lang felt that it was more reliable for local soldiers to implement a completely professional military system, which would put too much pressure on finances. In addition, too many soldiers are out of work, which has an adverse impact on the economy, and a small number of regular soldiers can certainly be professionalized and turned out of production, but reserve soldiers who have received a certain degree of training should not be completely detached from production.

There is a certain intermittent nature of agricultural production, and there is a relatively fixed period of leisure every year, which is actually very suitable for gathering for training. The prevalence of mercenaries in Switzerland was the result of the regular training of rural peasants in their free time.

Although this policy of relying on soldiers and peasants is likely to make local forces exert too much influence in the army, thus forming a force to resist the imperial power, the ancient Chinese and Western emperors were worried, and would rather hire foreign mercenaries than let the local forces grow, Zhou Lang was also worried, but considering that modern society is no longer ancient, the combat effectiveness of regular soldiers is enough to suppress these militias who are only used as reserve soldiers.

Another consideration has a distinct ideal color, that is, Zhou Lang feels that even if a system has loopholes and drawbacks, it often cannot be manifested in the early days, and the government military system is not strong for a while; On the negative side, if his dynasty does begin to decay one day, it is better to let the armed forces within Chinese society take its place than to let foreign enemies invade. There is no eternal dynasty in the world, if it is doomed to perish, between being overthrown by the peasant uprising and the alien race entering the Central Plains, Zhou Lang would rather choose the peasant uprising to rebuild the order, between the peasant uprising and the local tyrant to replace it, Zhou Lang would rather be replaced by the local tyrant, because the local tyrant is often more restrained than the peasant uprising, and will not kill too much.

Of course, this system is only designed under the current social situation, and it is based on the national condition that the peasant population accounts for the majority, and once the urban population begins to dominate, this system must be changed, but Zhou Lang may not see it. Because after so many years of industrialization, China's urban population has increased several times, but it has only grown from less than 10 percent to nearly 30 percent, that is, these three percent of the population who make a living in the city have not completely separated from the rural society, most people will choose to return to their hometowns for the New Year every New Year's holiday, and the number of "urban people" in the pure sense of the normal city is just over the beginning, and this status quo is still far from the state dominated by the urban population.

The victory of Prussia was based on the management of the peasant soldiers by the Junker landlords, and until the First World War, Moltke and other high-ranking Junker officers were full of distrust of the urban soldiers. Moltke was reluctant to carry out a general mobilization, believing that it would have to recruit a large number of urban soldiers into the army, fearing that the slippery habits of the city dwellers would bring about the traditional atmosphere of the German army.

Of course, Zhou Lang still made a lot of precautions against the township warriors and soldiers of the armor protection system, and the local official positions such as the chief of the local wealthy clan were often only responsible for gathering rural soldiers, and the professional officers sent by the military were responsible for training. Of course, these local powerful forces, they still have influence over these soldiers. Because these rural soldiers have not separated from the rural social system, the rural society is controlled by these local wealthy clans and squires. Coupled with the fact that there are all kinds of complicated blood and in-law relationships that have been formed for hundreds of years, these trained soldiers, when it really comes to the collapse of social order, they must still listen to their patriarchs, landlords, and Master Huang.

But as long as the social order does not collapse, this system of village soldiers is the most suitable until the completion of industrialization. Because if you don't train these peasant laborers as a supplement, you have to choose other forces, such as the Kazakh herdsmen, who may be easier to mobilize and let them be called up at any time in wartime as tribal mercenaries, but can you rest assured? Once the social order collapses, these tribal armies will become the most experienced armed forces, and the peasants in the interior who have no combat experience and armed experience at all will be just lambs.

Therefore, under Zhou Lang's weighing, in addition to maintaining the two standing armies of war soldiers and auxiliary soldiers, a large number of township soldiers are trained as reserve soldiers, such a number of soldiers, based on the basis of 300 million peasants, the proportion of men and women is basically balanced, there are 150 million men, and the average life expectancy has reached 50 years old, assuming that each age group is average, then there are more than 3 million male population in each age group, and the military service conscription age is 18 to 30 years old in the past 12 years, and there are 36 million men who can be conscripted. In fact, there are more than that, because the population is growing and the population is younger.

However, due to the limitation of material resources, it is impossible for Zhou Lang to train 40 million soldiers, so even if they are township soldiers, they often have to be selected before they can be used as township soldiers. Previously, we have made a detailed comparison of the soldiers of all dynasties, and believe that the extraction of one out of ten is a safe limit, and such an extraction has the least impact on agricultural production, so for a long time in ancient times, this standard was implemented during war; Individual crisis moments can reach 1 out of 5, but it cannot be normalized. Therefore, in the end, Zhou Lang determined that the number of training personnel was based on the ratio of one out of five, that is, from 40 million school-age soldiers, 8 million were selected for training, but in wartime, long-term operations can only be transferred to a maximum of 4 million troops, and in times of crisis, such as the disaster of destroying the country, 8 million people can be mobilized to fight.

This number, in the eyes of everyone, is more than enough.