440 MILITARY REFORMlems had been overcome in the Royal Division of the seventeenth century and
could be rectified in other units by strict enforcement of laws requiring all duty
soldiers to serve on duty, by punishing all commanders and clerks who exempted
them illegally in return for cloth payments or taxes, and by limiting taxes paid
by the support taxpayers to published schedules.
Unfortunately, he was only able to believe that the Royal Division had suc-
ceeded in overcoming these problems because he was largely unaware of the
problems that the Royal Division had experienced. His assumption that he could
reduce overall taxation rates and individual burdens on support taxpayers had
already been questioned in court discussion by fiscal conservatives like Kim Yuk.
He thought he could manipulate the rules of the game to lessen individual
burdens of service on the duty soldier without reducing necessary quotas for
national defense by increasing the number of groups of duty soldiers for each
unit and the time intervals between the tours of duty, and by increasing the num-
ber of support taxpayers that would support the duty soldier. And he sought to
reduce taxes on the support taxpayer by reducing the tax rate. Unfortunately,
both were doomed to failure, although Yu should not be held totally responsi-
ble for not seeing it. Expanding the interval between tours of duty meant that
the duty soldiers might lose the edge in training during the long layoffs if local
training in the districts were not maintained up to par. The reduction of tax rates
did not offset the increase in the number of support taxpayers per duty soldier
that he prescribed, and his supposed low tax rate was in fact higher than the low-
est possible rate at the time. Yu was already out of date on the rate, and thus
miscalculated the true cost of supporting his army.
Yu advertised his plan of military service as one that avoided the pitfall of
long-term service, because only one of every four peasants would have to serve
as a soldier while the rest paid taxes, and the duty soldier would return home
after his two-month tour of duty and not be called up again for a year and a
half at the least. Unfortunately, the long term of inactivity between tours of
duty created the likelihood of the loss of military skills by the duty soldiers, a
problem that no military professional could have willingly condoned, and Yu's
solution to provide interim, off-duty training appears woefully inadequate.
Yu appears to have thought that financing soldiers by support taxpayers
assigned to rotating service soldiers was better than drawing revenues from state
treasuries to support long-term, professional soldiers simply because it made
the military system self-supporting and no longer a concern of the fiscal author-
ities, but this was nothing more than an exercise in self-delusion. The support
persons were still paying a tax established by the state to the granaries of mili-
tary units (as well as to duty soldiers) at a rate set by the state. Excluding the
burden of military finance from the civilian Ministry of Taxation may have made
it less susceptible to embezzlement by civil officials and clerks, but it did not
eliminate the possibility of corruption by the garrison commanders and officials
in charge of the military treasuries.
Yu objected strongly to the use of ordinary grain taxes to finance military ser-