Chapter 2071 - Undercurrents in the Army

These "young officers" had climbed through the ranks as the army expanded and their seniority accumulated. Some now occupied critical positions in army headquarters or branch commands; others led battalions in the field. They had become a constituency the Executive Committee and military high command could no longer afford to dismiss.

Personnel shuffles were one matter. The political front presented another animal entirely. From the beginning, the Executive Committee had labored to strengthen civilian oversight of the armed forces. One particular high official—a serial occupant of key Executive Committee posts—was, strictly speaking, a co-founder of the Fubo Army itself. He had pioneered the legendary "tractor training method" in those desperate early days. The victory telegram from Chengmai had borne three signatures as co-equal signatories, a calculated gesture that betrayed the Committee's careful maneuvering on military personnel. To speak bluntly: the serious dysfunction plaguing Army staff work stemmed in part from the fact that the officer managing day-to-day operations for the entire General Staff—the army's de facto "number one staff officer"—didn't even hold a military commission. Moreover, this supreme strategist's credentials were not entirely beyond reproach.

During the formation of the Huanan Army, the General Army's Chief of Staff position could be held concurrently by the Army Commander. After all, a General Army during campaign planning served merely as a coordinating apparatus, and communications limitations wouldn't permit micromanaging tactical command across three widely separated fronts. But if the three constituent brigades still lacked proper staff departments, even routine administrative work would collapse under its own weight. The situation had become intolerable: how could the great, glorious, and correct Council of Elders—which demanded twentieth-century standards in all domains—permit an army to function without a staff system? It was nothing short of civilizational regression.

Establishing staff departments—at minimum equipping the brigade-level headquarters with functional staff offices—couldn't be accomplished with naturalized officers whose formal education barely rose above primary school. The General Staff convened an all-night "conjure something from nothing" crisis session and ultimately resorted to classic bureaucratic cannibalization: rob Peter to pay Paul. Elder military officers from various specialized branch commands were reassigned wholesale to fill the brigade headquarters. A crash course in staff procedures was hastily organized—"three parts alike is pretty good"—and the skeleton staff organizations were, after a fashion, patched together.

The Artillery branch was to be dispersed at company level throughout the brigades for this campaign. Battalion-level artillery headquarters were deemed superfluous overhead. Thus, every Elder officer in Artillery Command down to battalion level underwent mass conversion into staff officers at various echelons.

First Brigade's Zhu Mingxia was both militarily competent and politically reliable, enjoying the full confidence of the high command. Accordingly, the First Brigade Chief of Staff position was held concurrently by the brigade commander himself. The Second Brigade's Commander You was a brigade leader purely because of his ruthlessness—his military education measured exactly zero—so the professionally artillery-trained Ying Yu was appointed Chief of Staff to prop him up. The Third Brigade's Fu Sansi had commanded troops and served in headquarters; no one in the army matched his comprehensive résumé. Zhang Bailin, who had been serving as commandant of the Army Artillery Training Regiment, was therefore assigned to his staff for "further studies."

"I have no opinions," Zhang Bailin said. "A soldier's duty is to obey orders."

"All right, enough with the empty rhetoric." Xi Yazhou gave a faint, sardonic smile. "Reassigned from branch command to a staff position with no executive authority? You can't possibly have no opinions."

Zhang Bailin was young, after all. A few needling remarks from Xi Yazhou made his face flush crimson. He blurted out: "If you want my honest thoughts on the transfer—I really don't have any. I understand East Gate's predicament. There are only so many Elder officers to go around; somebody has to get shuffled. What I do resent is the Executive Committee—the State Council..." He grew confused mid-sentence. In the past, one could simply curse "the damned Executive Committee," but after the Third Plenary Session and the sweeping governmental restructuring, he wasn't even sure which entity to curse anymore. "Anyway, they treat us Army men like pack mules!"

Xi Yazhou said nothing. He simply handed him a cigarette.

Zhang Bailin lit the cigar, took a hard drag, and proceeded to air every grievance that had congealed over the years.

His complaints represented the accumulated frustrations of the "young officers" throughout the Army. The old guard—even if they nursed grievances—would never voice them publicly, much less gather to vent en masse. They preferred to seek out senior Elders with whom they had personal connections and "blow the wind" in private, carefully calibrated whispers in the right ears.

The "young officers" operated under no such constraints. At virtually every internal gathering, they railed against "the Executive Committee"—and though that body no longer existed, it remained the faceless dragon in their collective imagination.

Ever since the Second Anti-Encirclement Campaign's victory—when the Fubo Army had chased the enemy to the very gates of Guangzhou and launched the Pearl River Triangle offensive—through the subsequent Operation Engine and all its subordinate actions—the Shandong Expedition, the Jeju Island Campaign, Operation Hegemon—a common thread united them all: the Army had actively participated, yet invariably played second fiddle. The Pearl River Delta battles belonged to the Navy. The small units penetrating deep into hostile territory included Army personnel, true, but their backbone was the Marine Corps. The Shandong Expedition and Jeju Campaign were, from a command perspective, textbook studies in civilian control over the military. Lu Wenyuan and Feng Zongze had both been dispatched by the Executive Committee to serve as front-line commanders—though Feng Zongze answered more to the Civil Affairs Commission, while Lu Wenyuan juggled overlapping masters at the External Affairs Bureau and the Ministry of Colonial Trade. Operation Hegemon was the sole purely military operation—and Admiral Ming Qiu had held overall command.

So where did that leave the Army? Either, like Zhu Mingxia and Nangong Wudi, you assisted the civilians in the dirty, exhausting grunt work. Or, under the banner of "amphibious operations," you took orders from the Navy, serving only as rear-guard, reception committees, and battlefield cleanup crews. Most intolerable of all was the Marine Corps—created with the connivance of the Council's inner circle—equipped with superior weapons, doing the Army's work, yet somehow still counting as Navy.

Think it through: the appearance of the Marine Corps was no accident. It embodied a military-building philosophy that had been tacitly accepted within the Executive Committee all along. The theory went: given the enormous threat standing armies pose to political regimes, the army should be weakened as much as operationally feasible. Creating the Marine Corps was the direct manifestation of this doctrine—functionally dividing the Army's natural mandate, diluting its institutional strength. Likewise, though the Navy was minuscule, they conjured up a Coast Guard to carve away coastal patrol authority. Then, under the pretexts of "streamlining" and "efficiency," they split off all logistics units into a separate Joint Logistics Command answerable to neither Army nor Navy. Layer upon layer, all designed to divide and rule.

Zhang Bailin grew more agitated as he spoke, gesturing with his cigarette like a conductor leading an invisible orchestra of resentment:

"Is the Marine Corps some unique exception? Then what is the National Army? What is the Security Force? What is the White Horse Troop? What are those militiamen the Deer Manor Master organized? Whenever there's a direct combat mission for the Army, the higher-ups always conspire with local Elders to conjure up some messy substitute.

"They'd rather trust bands of foreign mercenaries—Japanese, Koreans, God knows who else—than give the Army half a squad of proper equipment. Hell, they'd trust men armed with cold weapons over us.

"While the Army roughed it outdoors pacifying Hainan, in the end the National Army came to harvest the fruits. Meanwhile, Special Reconnaissance got dispatched to steal the glory of anti-bandit tactical guidance, leaving the Army to shoulder the blame for a 'command failure resulting in total annihilation.' If the Army had been in charge from the start instead of some county magistrate sent by the Civil Affairs Commission flapping his mouth, would there have been a total wipeout?

"We Army men have to beg for every extra pair of chopsticks, but a liaison officer dispatched by the External Affairs Bureau can openly burn Council funds to keep a gang of who-knows-what thugs on retainer! And how did that end? Special Recon still had to go clean up the mess.

"While the Army froze and starved fighting bravely in Shandong, for the mere Laizhou operation they had to dispatch an abacus-pusher to sit over the Army's head as front-line commander. This same abacus-pusher then put on airs, playing war-room officer for the Xiamen operation! Once he'd grabbed enough glory, he went right back to pushing his abacus.

"The ancestor of all these pathologies is the Special Reconnaissance Team from the army's founding days! If the pie weren't so small right now, you'd already see monstrosities like a 'Tax Police Corps' hatching in the shadows.

"If the Council of Elders continues down this path," Zhang Bailin said bitterly, "the ones who'll win this realm for the Council will be every manner of militia, security force, and White Horse Troop—everyone except the Army itself."

(End of Chapter)