MILITARY REORGANIZATION 535
reduction of forces in the capital was an admirable goal, but it would have required
other measures that were quite difficult to achieve at that time: the elimination
of politics from the capital guards, reduction of the capital guards relative to
provincial military forces, and unification and centralization of authority in the
hands of the king and the regular bureaucracy.
He planned to strengthen provincial and regional forces by adopting the chin 'g-
wan or rcgional garrison or command center with jurisdiction over a number of
administrative districts to provide the double-door phalanx of defense against
invading forces proposed by Yu Songnyong. He hoped to reconstitute land and
sea forces alikc on the basis of Ch'i Chi-kuang's sog'o system of an ascending
hierarchy of units located in the most strategic places possible, to combine civil
and military responsibilities by correlating low-level troop units with civil dis-
tricts and bring civil magistrates into the chain of command of provincial forces,
and to retain the existing, Korean sag '0 troop units, but exclusively constituted
of slaves, as some kind of national guard that would train at home.
His plan for the deployment of forces in the provinces owed much to Yu
Songnyong's hierarchical system of strategic garrisons overseeing civil districts
as subordinate units of military organization. Even though the system looked
on paper as if it filled the countryside with soldiers, it would not really have
been effective against foreign invaders who could concentrate their forces at will.
The major flaw in his system was that he placed more faith in defensive war-
fare and fixed positions than in mohility and flexibility.
The strategy was not completely based on militia organization and yet called
for a significant role for district magistrates in the military at the lower end of
provincial organization, hut were they ready and equipped to meet the task? By
his own admission, the civil magistrate of his own time had to be converted hy
a thorough reorganization of education to become a generalist of the classical
type, skilled in the military as well as the liheral and civil arts. This was not such
an easy task in an era of Nco-Confucian ideology and civilian domination. The
idea was good, the chance for achieving it slim.
Yu also urged the production and distribution of muskets and other weapons
and favored the construction of defensive walls and fortifications. An admirer
of the most advanced military technology available at the time and a supporter
ofYu Songnyong's radical call to depart from convention to adopt more advanced
foreign techniques, he was not, however, a radical advocate of open-ended tech-
nological development. He appears to have been content with the weapon mix
of smooth-bore muskets, bows and arrows, and swords and spears that charac-
terized the partial shift toward firearms made in the I 590s, and he made no plans
to convert all the troops to musket hearers. no doubt because neither Japanese
nor Ming forces consisted exclusively of musketeers. His praclical considera-
tions about walls and defensive fortifications was also informed heavily by moral
criteria associated with the ancient Chou and confined to a defensive technol-
ogy applicable to the age before firearms and cannon, the last of which he
neglected even to discuss. And he was not aware of the financial constraints placed