Unlike the explosive propaganda that used the Jamestown bombing to interfere in the Irish war ten years ago, the mainstream propaganda media in China and the United States after the Nantes tragedy almost unified the tone of "salute before soldiers" this time.

It seems that as long as the French sincerely admit their mistakes and give compensation, China and the United States can still seek reconciliation based on the interests of long-term friendly trade cooperation between the two sides.

This kind of news makes many young people a little angry, but it also reassures some older people, after all, not everyone is a war maniac, especially the older generation of citizens who experienced the impact of the war on Britain ten years ago.

It is exciting to be able to dig up another war reparation, but the direct benefits that will actually fall on ordinary citizens may not be much.

As time enters the last month of the year, the annual winter break and intensive holiday schedule are coming. After a number of shouts of "where is our fleet", the attention of the media began to shift, and the mood fluctuations in several large cities first eased. Then, news of the new local council elections began to dominate the headlines.

And in small and remote cities with weaker information mobility and a relatively shorter average migration history, the Nantes tragedy has not been able to touch the depths of the national psyche. So most people have returned to a wait-and-see state about how the country will handle its future relationship with France.

After all, for the most part, peace and contentment remain the main themes on people's minds.

……

In the conference hall of the Ministry of Defence in Manchester City, the regular year-end summary meeting chaired by Defense Minister Zheng Quan is underway.

The recruitment of recruits for the army and navy in 1645 has long been over, the training of recruits is in good condition, and the complex and cumbersome replacement and transfer of officers and men of various overseas garrison units is about to begin; At present, the infrastructure construction and maintenance of domestic and overseas military bases this year have basically completed the expected progress......

Two colonel-level officers, representing the Army and the Navy respectively, took the stage to explain the annual work content of their respective services, among which the Navy is still Colonel Katerina, who has been unbeatable for many years.

However, in another month, Katarina, who has served in the Chinese Navy for many years, will retire, which also means that the Chinese American army, which has not increased the number of women for many years, will lose one more popular female soldier.

In recognition of Caterina's dedication to the U.S. Navy at a time when talent was at its most scarce, and for her significant contributions to the U.S. Navy's infancy. Katerina will be promoted to Commodore a week before her retirement, becoming the first nominal female senior general since the founding of the Chinese military.

When the representatives of the army and navy finished their year-end summaries, the officers, including Katerina, withdrew from the conference room, leaving only Defense Minister Zheng Quan and the four senior officers of the army and navy to continue the discussion behind closed doors.

They are, in order: Admiral Wang Tiezhu, commander-in-chief of the Navy, Vice Admiral Sun Yang, chief of the General Staff of the Navy, Admiral Chen Liwen, commander-in-chief of the army, and Lieutenant General He Yu, chief of the general staff of the army.

Admiral Zhang Chunrui, deputy commander-in-chief of the Navy and chief of the Navy's Personnel Inspectorate, is required to attend the annual core closed-door discussion, but this year his place is empty.

Like most of the people who are privately worried, Zhang Chunrui, who is 57 years old and is in the prime of a senior general, has been hospitalized again, and has become a patient with former President Chen Changyuan, who is not in good health as before.

Since about four years ago, Zhang Chunrui has noticed that his physical health has been declining. For several months of the year, they have to leave their jobs to recuperate and even be hospitalized. At the beginning of this year, Zhang Chunrui was finally diagnosed with lung cancer, which cast a shadow on most people's hearts.

With Huamei's current medical technology, although it is proud of the whole era, not to mention the treatment of cancer, even the testing methods are almost blank. As the former president of Chinese medicine, Chen Yuanyuan, who is a leading Chinese medical artist, can only make a judgment for Zhang Chunrui's condition with decades of clinical experience when he is not lightly ill.

Zhang Chunrui's absence again was the moment the door of the conference room was closed. There was a long silence for a while. As Army General Chen Liwen coughed, the people present had to regain their spirits.

"Lao Chen, last time I agreed with Lao Wang, Lao Zhang and Lao Bao on the army and navy military education reform plan, how did you think?" Zheng Quan was the first to break the dullness. took out a few pieces of paper from Wen Jiàn's folder, with a hint of expectation on his expression, "We are all old, and we can still work hard for fifteen to twenty years." Therefore, we must take into account in advance the subsequent development layout of the army, especially the stability of the officer corps. ”

"From the perspective of controlling the next fifty years, I approve of your proposal. However, copying the aristocratic system of the officer corps in Britain and Germany is contrary to the long-term development of the country and the general direction of the people's expectations, after all, we are a country of immigrants, and we want more young people to see the hope of joining the army. ”

Seeing that Zheng Quan was repeating the topic of the reform of the army's military educational institutions in the same old tune, Chen Liwen was a little impatient. Because once he agrees to this plan, it means that the image of the Chinese Army and the cultural spirit of the army that he has worked so hard to build will be turned upside down.

The aristocracy of the officer corps has long been a tradition in European countries, and it is a manifestation of the fact that the control of the army by the state organs is always concentrated in the aristocracy. In Chen Liwen's mind, the perfect army he understood should be a pan-national officer corps with a high degree of professional ethics and a national enterprising spirit, rather than a group of stubborn interests and orderly groups who hold military command based on their social status or wealth.

"It's too idealistic, Old Chen. I know your ideals, why don't the old guys from all walks of life practice their ideals in their own fields? Wang Tiehammer patted his companion on the shoulder, and his face was no longer the expression that often quarreled with the other party on military expenses, "But no matter how we understood it in the first half of our lives, we are now the nobles of this country, and we are the stubborn interests and order-abiding group in your mouth." ”

According to the vision of the Navy General Command, first of all, starting in the fall of 1646, the Long Island Naval Academy was renamed the "Long Island Naval Higher Military Academy", which will no longer become a comprehensive teaching institution for non-commissioned officers and junior and senior officers of all levels of the Navy, but will become a specialized middle and senior military educational institution.

Those who can enter the Long Island Naval Higher Military Academy will be at least captain or above in the Navy, providing advanced training for middle and senior officers in the Navy.

Second, in Qingcheng City, Haizhou, the Navy has re-established a full-time closed management "Qingcheng Naval Officer Academy" to allocate the best military instructors and officially recruit students from the public.

The institute is dedicated to two age groups, one is the student who is at least 16 years old and has reached the secondary school graduation level. The second is the fresh local university graduates. The former lasts six years and the latter lasts three years, and both will receive the rank of lieutenant after graduation. However, judging from the actual situation, due to the shortage of college students, most of the future students of the Qingcheng Naval Academy are mainly the former.

Not only that, but the admission assessment method of the college is also very interesting, which is divided into two types: one is the cultural assessment with a high threshold, which is oriented to outstanding talents from ordinary national families; The other is "high tuition make-up points" admission, which allows extremely high tuition costs to make up points within a certain range of the difference in assessment scores.

Other words. On the basis of continuing to maintain the absorption of outstanding talents, this new naval academy provides an additional more convenient channel for the children of wealthy elites. This set is completely plagiarized from some unspoken rules that have been implemented by some ordinary universities in China for many years.

Although the monetary price of "making up points" is not low and can discourage the vast majority of ordinary families, for truly wealthy families, this is precisely the setting with the least threshold. To put it bluntly, this is an aristocratic military educational institution with naval military education as the core.

Unless it's really a stupid fool who can't complete the final academic assessment, any lieutenant in the Navy who graduates from here will be the best elite in the country. They will be a core source of future mid- and high-ranking officers in the U.S. Navy.

Finally, it is to set up a "Jiangcheng Navy Non-commissioned Officer School" in Jiangcheng City, Jiangzhou, which is mainly for ordinary national children to apply for examinations and for the selection and enrollment of soldiers on active duty in the Navy, and the threshold for cultural assessment is low. The duration of study also ranges from one to three years.

It will focus on training professional naval non-commissioned officers and junior officers, taking over the original teaching function of the Long Island Naval Academy. In contrast, the faculty will be inferior to the first two naval educational institutions, and the cadets who graduate from them will only be awarded the rank of second lieutenant.

Continue in this mode. Ten years later, the Chinese Navy will not only have the best warships in the world in this era, but also a thoroughly aristocratic officer corps.

……

"Old Chen. What are you thinking? ”

There was another dullness that lasted for a few minutes, and He Yu couldn't help but pat the army general's arm.

"What's your opinion?"

Recovering from his contemplation and meeting a few glances, Chen Liwen had to turn his head to his good partner for many years.

"I remember that last year, the Army General Staff made a very interesting statistics on the Foreign Legion: In the past ten years, in all the combat records of the Foreign Legion, the casualty rate of the officers and men of the company in which the son of a wealthy man served as the commander in the course of performing the same tactical task was usually 5 to 10 percent lower than that of a company in which an ordinary civilian officer was the chief officer. In addition, on the issue of personal military merit allowances, ordinary civilian officers usually have a little more opinion than those of wealthy officers. Then I compared and counted the numbers of several combat companies of the Wehrmacht, and the results were about the same. Of course, due to the difference in the source of officers and soldiers, there will also be many officers from the lower nobility in Europe in the Foreign Legion. ”

This illustrates a problem: in the current group of junior and junior officers in the army, the better the family background, the higher the comprehensive quality, the more balanced the talent, the better their loyalty, affection and stable thinking, and the affluent background makes it easier for them to pursue the sense of honor and achievement of the military profession; The junior officers from ordinary civilian backgrounds have relatively simple personalities, but their ambition, enterprising spirit, and enlistment in the army to obtain wealth are stronger, and there are more talented potentials. To put it simply, the difference in spirit and behavior between the 'rich second generation' and the 'phoenix man' in the army is more obvious. However, these are relatively speaking, after all, our army is too small, and these examples are not fully empirical. ”

After thinking about it for a while, He Yu expressed his views on the current middle and lower-ranking officers in the army, and it was not difficult to see that he was also more inclined to the reform of military education in the Ministry of Defense and the Navy Command.

"Yes, what is needed for us is an officer corps that is absolutely loyal, stable in thought, and mentally healthy, and in this respect, the children of the wealthy class are relatively better."

Vice Admiral Zhang Sunyang, chief of the General Staff of the Navy, a staunch supporter and practitioner of the "aristocracy of the army's officer corps," was also persuaded on the side. With the support of Wang Tiehammer, Sun Yang personally ran the Navy's education reform program this year, and according to internal rumors, Sun Yang was a veritable second generation of small rich before the crossing.

"Hmph, education for all can improve the quality of the whole people, and it can also greatly reduce the impact of family background on the growth of military talents."

Although he is absolutely loyal to the cause of crossing the group, it is difficult for Chen Liwen to accept this concept of "people are divided into groups", which probably has a lot to do with his own growth experience before crossing over, and because of this, the construction of army culture and the promotion of talents have also been deeply imprinted on his thoughts.

"Emotionally speaking, we are all farmers or grassroots sons, and we need to take a more impartial view of the problems of the children of the rich and the children of the common people. But in practical terms, we are no longer a simple group of 'black chickens turning into phoenixes'. In this country, which has only been established for 25 years, there is no real aristocracy in theory, but we have indeed made the leap from grassroots to ruling class, and there are reasons to incorporate the core of the military into our ruling ideology. And for our ordinary people, they have long been accustomed to this natural order of the times. ”

"At present, the construction of the country is still in its infancy, and we cannot and dare not relax our grip on the core culture and spiritual connotation of the armed forces that are in line with the interests of our regime. At this stage, it is an indisputable fact that the comprehensive quality of the children of the rich is definitely higher than that of the children of the common people, when the educational resources of our society are not sufficient! Even in the 21st century, the military power of advanced countries is still controlled by the elite and the wealthy, so what can we be the exception? ”

"Therefore, we must maintain the stability of the core construction of the army for the next 50 years. Moreover, I believe that with the country's economic development and ideological progress, the middle class will grow stronger and stronger, and our military will usher in a fairer and more scientific talent selection system in the future. ”

Seeing that Chen Liwen was a little caught in the deep pit of love, Sun Yang clenched his fist and knocked it on the table.

"Well, the military is the core of the country's overall interests, so let's have an internal democratic vote. If you agree with this plan for the reform of military education, please raise your hand. ”

Seeing that the atmosphere at the scene was getting worse and worse, Zheng Quan had no choice but to raise his voice, intending to use his authority advantage to put an end to this military education reform that had dragged on for many years.

Except for Chen Liwen, everyone else raised their hands. But judging from his expression, Chen Liwen was not a rejection at the beginning, but more like a waiver after being persuaded.

"Well, let's move on to the proposal for the formation of the 'First Volunteer Brigade of the Wehrmacht'. According to congressional advice, this improvised infantry brigade was to be sent to the Far East for deployment in the fall of 1646. ”

Seeing that the differences had been smoothed out, Zheng Quan pulled out the biggest topic of this closed-door discussion. (To be continued......)