In the conference room of the Joint Staff, the military bigwigs gathered again, and Shi Qingxuan, who was the leader, said: "Although this result is far from our expectations, this is already the best result we can strive for!" ”

"Okay? Forty percent of next year's fiscal expenditure is really too low, so how can it support next year's operational needs and the needs of army expansion? Han Xiangfang, the chief of the ordnance department at the bottom, said: "According to our plan, we will have to expand the active Royal Army to more than 30 divisions next year, and it is not a small cost to fully replace the breech-loading rifles and front-loading rifled guns!" ”

"And on the side of our navy, the expansion and rest of the ports are not small!" Lin Dabiao also sighed and continued: "Those corrupt officials in the cabinet, how dare they start, they want to take a full 60% of the financial allocation, how can they spend so much money?" ”

Hearing Lin Dabiao say this, Shi Qingxuan also sighed in his heart, because Bi Yutong also said: There will be no large-scale war next year, how can your military spend so much money? ”

Yesterday, he and Bi Yutong were called by Lin Zhe and scolded him, and in the face of Lin Zhe's anger, Bi Yutong and Shi Qingxuan had to give up their original insistence, and then made concessions in the proportion of financial distribution.

In the 1860 budget for next year, the military received 40 percent, while the rest was shared by the cabinet ministries and other agencies, and of course the remaining 60 percent of the cabinet and other agencies had nothing to do with the military.

However, at that time, Shi Qingxuan also focused on saying that this year's war is still tense, and the pressure on military spending is quite large, so as compensation for next year's military spending cut. In the second half of this year, there will be a smaller reduction in military spending.

"The Ministry of Finance's budget for this year's fiscal revenue is about 150 million, and according to the current proportion. It is expected that next year's fiscal revenue will increase by a large margin, and it is possible that it will exceed 200 million won. In this way, even if the proportion of military spending we receive is lower, it will not be less than last year, and next year we will get about 80 million yuan of military budget. This year, there are still about 30 million military spending in the third and fourth quarters. That is to say, from now to next year, we can use about 110 million or so funds, and what we want to talk about today is not a foregone conclusion, under the military budget, how can we effectively support the Western Expedition and complete the expansion of the troops and the replacement of new equipment at the same time! Shi Qingxuan interrupted many of the people's complaints, but directly said the core of today's meeting.

Then how to use this obviously insufficient military spending to accomplish many of the military's plans. Don't look at the 80 million military expenses next year, but in fact, the hundreds of thousands of military troops, personnel salaries, necessary training, and other expenses alone add up to tens of millions, and then the Chinese army will continue to rise sharply, whether it is to clean up many illegal armed forces in the country or to conquer the northwest, Yunnan, and Sichuan regions, it will require a large amount of military spending.

What can be met is that next year's military spending pressure will definitely be even more tense than this year or even last year!

Hearing Shi Qingxuan say this, the other generals could only sigh and stop talking, they all knew that since Lin Zhe had made a decision, he would definitely not tolerate the change of the people below. If it is said that it is 40 percent, it is only 40 percent, and it will definitely not be tens of millions more.

The only thing that made the generals happy was that they had made remarkable achievements last year and this year, conquering the northern provinces, as well as Huguang and Jiangxi. These provinces will provide fiscal revenue for the central government from this year, although it is unlikely that there will be much increase this year, but after the Ministry of Finance uses this half year to reform the fiscal system of these newly occupied provinces. Then by next year, the central fiscal revenue will certainly increase by a large margin, and there will be no problem at all in exceeding 200 million yuan.

In this case. Even if the proportion is reduced to 40 percent, the military should still have at least 80 million or more in its hands. Although this money is still slightly insufficient for the growing Chinese Navy and Army, it can still be barely maintained with some hard work.

"Then let me say first, in the future, our top priority is still to capture Yunnan and Sichuan, in addition, we must continue to support the westward advance of the Sixth Army and the First Army, when these places are taken, we can talk about the follow-up nationwide clearance task, but in order to ensure the safety of the people in the control area, with the smooth progress of various reforms in various places, the task of bombing and suppressing in the control area must continue to maintain a high-pressure situation, but this part of the task can be handed over to the newly formed local garrison troops in the provinces!" Shi Qingxuan was the first to speak.

However, it soon became humane: "Even if the task of ammunition pressure in the rear is handed over to the garrison troops, the necessary expenses are also indispensable, I am afraid that because the combat effectiveness of the local garrison troops is not as good as that of the main force, this will be more expensive to fight!" ”

"You see, is the expansion plan we formulated at the beginning of the year a little slowed down, abandoning the plan to form 30 infantry divisions, and first focusing all our energy on the early stage of operations!"

However, some people retorted: "Now that the area controlled by the empire is getting bigger and bigger, how can the current dozen divisions and a few mixed brigades be enough, the expansion of troops is imperative, otherwise it will not be able to effectively control the existing areas, and now there is only one infantry division of the 14th Division in the northeast, and only one first division is stationed in the huge Zhili and Shandong and other places, and this situation is absolutely intolerable for a long time!" ”

"Once we complete the unification in the future, the territory of the empire will exceed 10 million square kilometers, and the border line will be tens of thousands of miles, even if it is calculated according to the minimum, it will take at least thirty divisions or more to effectively guarantee the territorial security of the empire, and if you want the empire to have some flexible deployment of mobile forces, then the strength must be maintained at more than fifty divisions to be slightly more generous!"

"You are wasting the local garrison troops by saying this, these local garrison troops are fully capable of the task of internal bomb pressure and border control in peacetime, you must know that the main force is not used to control the frontier, but to fight, and cannot be evenly distributed among the provinces!"

"To put it mildly, how many local garrisons are there now? How many garrisons are needed to control the frontiers and inland provinces in place of the main forces? Doesn't the garrison cost money? The cost of this garrison is not much less than that of the main force, and if there are more garrison troops, this will seriously compress the living space of the main force! ”

For a while, the generals in the conference room were coming and going, and watching these people talk, Lin Dabiao, the chief of the Navy Department on the side, was also secretly anxious in his heart, this total military expenditure is less, and I am afraid that it will be even more difficult for his navy to expand on a large scale at that time!

If this continues, when will we be able to build a huge fleet, and when will we be able to have enough strength to resist the huge fleets of Britain and France and other powers!

It is a pity that although no specific military expenditure allocation plan was decided at today's meeting, many people intentionally or unintentionally ignored the navy, and there was only one admiral Lin Dabiao among so many people present, which made him feel deeply alone, and no one cared about what he said.

After the meeting, Lin Dabiao looked at those army generals, and secretly made a decision in his heart that the navy must get rid of the control of the army and become an independent army, and the navy must not be reduced to a navy transport team.

Because of the dispute over military spending, Lin Zhegang settled the dispute between the cabinet and the military with a strong hand, and Lin Dabiao, the chief of the Admiralty, was on the secret fold, and this secret fold was not an ordinary cry or the like, but a coastal defense plan secretly formulated within the Admiralty.

The core of this plan is to defend the Empire's thousands of miles of sea frontiers!

This sentence is to completely abandon the Navy's previous identity positioning: to support the army's operations!

This sentence alone represents the Navy's attempt to get rid of the Army's subordinate position and strive to make itself a branch of the Army on the same footing.

The army guards the territory of the empire, and the navy guards the sea frontier of the empire!

This is Lin Dabiao's latest explanation of the status of the navy, and in order to achieve the goal of guarding the empire's 10,000-mile sea frontier, the navy hopes that the existing navy can be reorganized, and demands that the naval operations department be transferred from the joint staff to the navy department, and the navy department alone leads all the affairs of the navy, including operational command, military training, promotion, logistics, and so on.

To put it simply, the current navy and the army have to be separated, each with its own way!

In addition to this, the plan also proposes a short-term development plan for the Imperial Navy for the next three years and a long-term development plan for ten years!

In its three-year short-term development plan, the navy hopes to further expand the Shanghai naval base and at the same time build three new naval bases in Qingdao, Lushun, and Guangzhou, in an effort to get rid of the embarrassing situation that the navy currently has only one major port in Shanghai. So that whether the empire is going south or north, it has a well-equipped military port to moor.

In addition, the navy hopes to expand the size of the existing ocean-going fleet to two battleships of more than 3,000 tons and six cruisers of more than 1,000 tons in the next three years. In addition, it will integrate the existing inland river and offshore gunboats to establish a fleet of offshore gunboats with more than 10 ships of 500 to 1,000 tons.

In the next 10 years, the navy hopes to build and maintain an ocean-going fleet capable of fighting a decisive battle with the fleets of the European and American powers, and the fleet needs at least four main battleships of more than 5,000 tons or even larger tonnage, six second-class battleships of between 3,000 and 5,000 tons, and more than 12 cruisers between 1,000 and 3,000 tons.

In addition, the three naval bases of Guangzhou, Lushun and Qingdao were expanded into the same major bases as Shanghai, and the ports of Jilong Port (Keelung) in northern Taiwan, Dagou Port (Kaohsiung) in Fengshan County in southern Taiwan, Zhoushan in Zhejiang, Zhanjiang in Guangdong, and Sanya in Hainan were repaired to provide coal, fresh water, grain, ammunition and other supplies.

When Lin Zhe saw the naval plan submitted by Lin Dabiao, he was also frightened! (To be continued.) )