Roy A L DIVISION MODEL 399because private and official slaves had been brought into the military service
system, primarily by membership in the new, sogo, units, to compensate for the
reduction of available commoner adult males, State exploitation of slaves for
service created two new problems: competition with the slaveowners for the labor
power of their human property, and increasing burdens on the slaves themselves,
who wcre now asked to perform service for the state along with their obliga-
tions to their masters.
The system of service continued, for the most part, to be based on a bifurca-
tion between rotating duty soldiers and taxpaying support personnel, but cor-
ruption in the military cloth support tax meant that officials and clerks were using
the tax as a device to increase both revenues and graft, and there was a grow-
ing trend toward the neglect of actual service in favor of tax payments. As a
result, there were not sufficient funds to support those men who did show up
for duty or provide special equipment to them, and the peasant support taxpay-
ers were subjected to oppressive taxes far beyond the legal limits.
Yu Hyongwon approached the problem of reform for the military the same
way he did for other questions, by returning to classical sources. Here he found
that the ideal model for a military system was to be found in the militia system
that accompanied the well-field system of Chou China. He defined the nature
of that system and traced the attempts to approximate it in post-Chou Chinese
history.
Since the militia system as well as the well-field system was now part of an
irretrievable past, the problem for Yu was to decide how much of the classical
model of militia organization could be restored and adapted to seventeenth-cen-
tury Korean life to restore the Korean military system to health.
Troop Shortages, Poor Training, CorruptionNo one was more aware of the deficiencies of the current system of military ser-
vice than Yu Hyongwon. The military rosters were worthless pieces of paper,
most of the troops remained untrained, and the system of military service itself
had been converted to a separate system of taxation based on the payment of
cloth, ostensibly for the support of duty troops that no longer existed.
Even garrisons of a thousand soldiers in fact did not have a single man on duty,
while the men who were assigned as soldiers [to the garrison] worried day and
night over whether they could manage the cloth tax payments, and did not know
a thing ahout shooting an arrow or riding a horse. All types of soldicrs. including
the infantry. cnded up as names [on the rolls] of cloth taxpayers. Even the so-
called cavalrymen only paid a cloth tax; not one of them had a horse.
The training of troops. the instruction of soldiers, the guarding of the country,
and defense against insults [from other countries] are hardly worth mentioning,
while tens of thousands of innocent people have been forced to endure the ago-
nies of flood and fire. Really what kind of a thing is this?"