Chapter 650: Change and Resistance

"The master has to participate in the farewell party of the Foshan Martial Arts Association, and also pull Sister Guan to Baoyin's sister is taming the horse and preparing for the Hong Kong Jockey Club, Sister Xiao is still writing a book, Sister Zhu is flipping the book, Sister An is protecting the fetus, and the official family knows, so I came, and there is ......"

I wanted to take Yan Sanniang and Baoyin, who knew a little bit about military affairs, to go, but it was Siniang who followed, although she had been appointed as a concubine, but she was in charge of the security affairs of the back garden, she was twenty-five years old this year, and she didn't want to give birth. And as her words fell, a little guy with a fluted head and a brain stood up from behind her.

"Father, the child also wants to go and see ......",

The eldest son, Li Kezai, who was seven years old, heard that his father was going to the Whampoa Army Academy, so he had the courage to ask Siniang to take him with him. When it came to Li Xi's side, this honest child who was bullied by his sister Li Kexi all day was even more panicked.

"Done your homework? Have you taken a leave of absence from your husband? ”

Li Shi lowered his face and asked, he had no experience in educating his children, so he had to follow the most basic principles of the Chinese people, be strict with his son, and spoil his daughter. Of course, he also knew that his father's status in the hearts of his children was extraordinary, and he always reminded himself that there should be love in strictness and guidance in spoiling, so as not to leave any shadows in his children's hearts.

What is the actual effect, Li Xian really has no way to evaluate, seeing that Li Kezai nodded repeatedly, his hands and feet were quite restrained, he shook his head helplessly, Sanniang's temperament seems to have been passed on to the eldest daughter, this kid is completely a negative example. But he was desperate for the danger of being punished, and he had to do it according to his own ideas, and he was particularly fond of guns, and after all, he still inherited Sanniang's stubbornness and interest.

The tip of the little lotus is beginning to emerge, and the new generation is about to grow up, and time is like a shuttle......

Li Xian expressed the emotion of the middle-aged man, nodded at his son, and then was infected by the child's smile, holding Siniang with one hand and his son with the other, and got into the carriage.

The emperor and his prince came to the Whampoa Army Academy in person, and it was still a surprise review, and Li Songshen, the dean of the academy, was under great pressure.

"Don't put on a guard of honor, I'm just here to see the situation of the new canon."

Li Shi rejected the suggestion that all the officers and men of the academy should be gathered for reading, and he came to do practical things.

"This ...... Progress is very slow, do not dare to deceive Your Majesty almost no progress. ”

Li Songshen's forehead was full of sweat, Li Xian was a little dissatisfied, but he didn't have a seizure, he waved his hand to take the road, he wanted to go to the drill to see.

Now that a country is waging war on all sides, there is no shortage of soldiers, and because the soldiers of the first wave of army expansion came from the guards, local garrisons, and colonial armies, they already have basic combat qualities.

However, compared with the elite army that has been maintained at 780,000 since the founding of the People's Republic of China, it is too far behind, and the main force has to be deployed in Burma, which has a complex environment, and it is necessary to do necessary intensive training to fight against the Burmese, who already have a certain degree of modern firearms combat capability.

Pulling the grassroots commanders of the newly formed divisions and battalions to the Whampoa Army Academy for emergency training can also be regarded as sharpening their guns on the spot, and it is even a little bit if they can gain a little. Officers at the rank of lieutenant and above of the newly formed divisions and battalions have all returned to the furnace in batches, and hundreds of cadets on the drill ground have all come from this experience.

If it is still a smoothbore gun and horizontal team tactics, the Anglo-Chinese Army has been tempered for more than ten years, and it is completely proficient, and most of these students are also veterans, and this set only needs to be revisited to get started.

But today's army is on the verge of change, because of the widespread use of steam engines, which has made front-loading rifled guns and mini-rounds finally mature weapons that can be equipped in large quantities. Ordinary people think that this kind of weapon can be popularized by relying on concepts, but Li Xi used to think so, but later he was hindered by a series of problems before he realized that technology is technology, industrialization is industrialization, and the two do not directly correspond. …,

Rifled guns have been equipped in the Anglo-Chinese army for a long time but are only used by skirmishers, and after so many years of use, the army's evaluation, like the navy's evaluation of rifled guns, is used as an auxiliary weapon to disrupt the opponent's formation and snipe the opponent's dignitaries is very good. However, to replace smoothbore guns, not to mention the cost, there are huge problems in reliability and standardization.

If the lead is hung and the rifling is worn, the material of the barrel is selected accurately, forged well, and the rifling is engraved to the standard, the impact is not very large, and the life of the barrel can be reliably predicted.

But if the material selection is improper, the forging error is large, and the rifling is deviated, the life of each gun is different, which is a fatal problem for the commander. Halfway through the battle, it was discovered how many rifled guns in the troops had been discarded, which was a great taboo. At present, the rifled guns equipped by the stragglers of the British and Chinese Army, the barrel life is only about 200 rounds, and the smoothbore gun has thousands of rounds, and the performance is still stable.

What's more, taking into account the factor of barrel cleaning, the rate of fire of rifled guns is worse than that of smoothbore guns, while Yinghua's smoothbore guns are well-made, and their accuracy is guaranteed to a certain extent, and with the rate of fire, it is enough to suppress the enemy. In terms of the range of infantry firepower, no enemy around Yinghua can defeat Yinghua, and there is no pressure to push the army to increase the range of infantry firepower.

On the other hand, the officers and men all believed that although the rifled gun could still have considerable accuracy at two or three hundred paces, this distance was not something that ordinary soldiers could shoot at the target, and it was of little significance.

Now that there is a steam engine, the stability of the wrought iron material used as the barrel has been greatly improved, and the forging and engraving processes have also begun to be standardized.

He didn't expect that the opposition was not only from the army, but also from the Foshan Manufacturing Bureau, and the old man Guan Fengsheng said with a snot and tears that if he really wanted to change the gun, the investment of the Manufacturing Bureau for so many years would come to naught. The process of forging steel barrels and grinding the bore has taken countless efforts and a lot of silver to climb to the current level step by step. Returning to the wrought iron barrel is even more reactionary against the tide for Guan Fengsheng.

The army's opposition is naturally bottomless, even if the rifled gun has a life of 1,000 rounds, it is still worse than the smoothbore gun, the rate of fire has not increased, and there are more influencing factors. What the army really wants to increase is the rate of fire. The rear-loading primer is in the testing stage, and even with the help of the French alchemist, the stability of the primer is still very problematic, but the army feels that it can wait, and it can wait for ten or twenty years, and the smoothbore gun is enough to dominate the Quartet.

After careful analysis, Li Shi had to admit one word: demand. The enemy around Yinghua is too poor, and the smoothbore guns and horizontal team tactics, coupled with the deep artillery power accumulated by Yinghua, are enough to form an all-round advantage. The question of the range of infantry fire is not an urgent concern of the army.

If it is in Europe, all parties to the war have a modern industrial system, and once the technology of front-loading smoothbore guns and gamini ammunition spreads, it will naturally become the goal of all parties' efforts, which will lead to the need to completely change the firepower of infantry, and this pressure does not exist in Yinghua.

Everyone thinks that it doesn't exist, but Li Xi can see that it exists, and the Battle of Burma has the British East India Company behind it. If it is not overpowered by technological superiority, the cost of the battle for Burma should be high. Then the Anglo-Chinese and the Britons fought for Burma, and even for Tom Kala, this pressure will become more and more obvious, and the sooner they occupy a technological advantage, the less price they will pay.

It's a pity that the resistance stumbled Li Xi's will, which is the sadness of being ahead of the times. Even he himself felt that it was not a matter of life and death, so he did not put much effort into it. …,

Around rifled guns, Li Shi did not promote much change in the army, and the eight-year style of the Holy Dao was still skirmisher equipment, but the proportion of stragglers in the army rose to a quarter. Moreover, Li Xi also specially set up a separate rifled gun training battalion and put it on the battlefield in Burma for actual combat testing.

Rifled guns and mini bullets are hardware changes, and Yinghua is also in the stage of transformation in the software of combat methods.

Relying on a little knowledge of being a military fan in his previous life, and in response to the current country's large-scale expansion of the army, insufficient training, and difficulty in achieving the proficiency of elite troops in horizontal team tactics, Li Xi felt that the time had come for the army to enter the era of column tactics.

In the past ten years or so, the Anglo-Chinese Army has been a horizontal team tactic, putting up a large horizontal formation, dignified and upright, and fighting in a daze. Because the size of the army is small and the degree of training can be guaranteed, this tactic is used with great skill, and rich experience has been accumulated.

However, there were two directions in this battle, one was the open land in the northwest, which had to be fought against the Manchu cavalry, and the other was the tropical jungle of Burma, where the terrain was complex, and the horizontal formation tactics of the two battlefields had huge flaws, so it was necessary to change to a highly flexible column tactic.

This is not to say that the combat effectiveness of column tactics is better than that of horizontal team tactics, but that column tactics are more suitable for organizing those units that are not well trained and have a large scale to give full play to their combat effectiveness, and at the same time, they are also more suitable for complex and changeable battlefields. During the Napoleonic era, the French infantry was able to carry forward the column tactics because they were far inferior in quality compared to the professional armies of neighboring countries

In an ideal hypothetical environment, the horizontal team, although stiff, is the most effective way to organize firepower and maximize firepower, and the fatal problem is that horizontal team tactics are an "elite culture" that requires soldiers to undergo years of unremitting training. Compared with the columns, which can exert their strength with a little training, the "technical route" is inherently lacking.

The reason why muskets can replace bows and crossbows is not because they are powerful and have a long range, but because muskets are cheaper and it is cheaper to train musketeers.

The replacement of horizontal tactics by column tactics is a typical example of "grassroots defeating elites", and history is written from the grassroots, which is how it came about.

But just as the promotion of rifled guns was blocked, Li Shi's change in this area encountered greater obstacles.

As far as the British and Chinese officers and men are concerned, from enlistment and fighting to the present, for more than 10 years, they have all been based on the tactics of horizontal formations, and the canons, combat examples, and summaries all revolve around this tactic, and this is their practice. They relied on this technique to kill all sides, and they knew the victory and defeat in their hearts, and they could not only master the army, but also the war.

Now they are asked to change their tactics, to change their troops from a tightly organized horizontal formation into a loose column, and then to change the formation and unfold it according to the situation on the battlefield.

Why did later generations say that the military was the most conservative group, and that they were never willing to give up their inherent traditions until the moment of life and death? Because this tradition is proved by history and their flesh and blood, and to make them traditional, they have to pay the price of blood. No matter how far-sighted and wise a great man is, it is impossible for him to dispel this conservatism in the army with his mouth and cannon.

Li Shi is now facing this situation, and he asked the Whampoa Army Academy to compile a column tactical textbook and carry out column tactical reform for the newly organized army, but no progress has been made.

"Wise Majesty, let the army lose its strict queue tradition, and discipline and courage will follow it......"

Looking at the scene of the chaotic column unfolding on the drill ground, Clinton complained very respectfully. The Anglo-Chinese military system was adjusted again in the eighth year of the Holy Dao, and the four general classes of preparing generals, regular generals, generals, and senior generals were changed to brigadier generals, major generals, lieutenant generals, and generals that Li Xi had always wanted. …,

"If it is our British army, unless the opponent's columns can be deployed in a timely and accurate manner, it is impossible to shake our British horizontal line head-on by relying on columns. And to complete such training, it takes no less effort than training horizontal team tactics. ”

Clinton's tail is high, and he was born in Britain with a deep tradition of horizontal team tactics, so he is naturally very unaccustomed to such tactical reforms as Li Shi.

"Yes, my army, you Britons will be met in Burma, why are you still here? As I recall, my resignation was approved three days ago. ”

Li Xi was very upset and was ready to drive this guy away.

Clinton immediately put on a face full of righteous indignation: "Those greedy businessmen of the British Company know that they are destroying the overall interests of Britain here!" Your Majesty, please rest assured, after I return to China, I will definitely promote peace between the two countries, and those scum who brazenly start a war will be punished by law! ”

The British East India Company's intervention in Burma and its secret confrontation with the British and Chinese not only affected the cooperation between the company's retail merchants and the British and Chinese in Malacca, but also made Clinton have to resign. But like Popper, the leader of the Merchant faction, Clinton was a staunch pro-British.

Li Shi nodded and said: "I also hope that we can live in peace with Britain, once the war is over, the British government and the East India Company can show enough sincerity, and I am also interested in the arms trade that the secretary once proposed." ”

Clinton was overjoyed and hurriedly curtsied.

Driving Clinton away, Li Shi looked at the drill field, his brows furrowed, and changed ...... After all, it didn't happen overnight.

"The rifled gun hits far, if you use this tactic, you can have more time to spread the formation, and the child thinks that the two together are the best!"

Li Kezai, who was watching from the side, suddenly came out with such a sentence, which not only made Li Xian stunned, but the surrounding officers also looked sideways.

This is not a new theory, the Whampoa Army Academy has already put forward this point when compiling a new canon, and any adult who knows a little about military affairs can think of it, but the problem is, the eldest prince is only seven years old, he can see so deeply, who taught it?

"In the royal library managed by Zhu Niangniang, there are also college classics, and children can read ...... if they have kung fu."

Li Kezai was not used to being the center of attention, so he lowered his head and stomped on his feet and whispered.

"Kid is good, I hope you can write "On War" in the future."

Li Xi then laughed, resistance is resistance, as long as you can move forward, as long as you can always hold the pulse of the times, this is enough, just like your eldest son, carefully cultivated, you should be able to grow into a master of military science in the future...... ）

This hand-hit update is provided by "Set Sail Li Ping I Am".