570 MILITARY REFORMWhen Yu wrote that he abhorred the idea of long-term, professional soldiers
on permanent salary like those of the contemporary Military Training Agency,
he was merely repeating the wisdom of his Chinese sources. As Ou-yang Hsiu
of the Sung period had pointed out in his discussion of the Tang military sys-
tem, an army of professional soldiers was a permanent drain on the treasury and
a potential political threat to the regime. Yu agreed, hut he also believed that the
combination of rotating duty soldiers and support taxpayers that had been in
etIect since the Koryo period was tantamount to the militia system subject only
to slight adaptation to Korean circumstance.
The support system was in use during Yu's lifetime with some of the capital
divisions, and it was adopted as the main mode of service and finance for the
Forbidden Guard Division (Kumwiyong) established in 1682, a decade after Yu's
death. Yu and others perceived its main advantage to be that it created an inde-
pendent financial base for each division and supposedly eliminated the burden
on the state treasury for funding permanent soldiers. Not only recluses like Yu,
but active officials like Song Siyol, also believed that the few thousand salaried
soldiers of the Military Training Agency were the main reason for the high cost
of the seventeenth-century military establishment, and if only these men could
be replaced by rotating soldiers backed up by their own support taxpayers, mil-
itary costs could be cut and heavy taxes on the peasantry reduced.
They were almost totally mistaken because they refused to see that support
taxpayers in the traditional system of Korea were in fact taxpayers and not mili-
tia soldiers. They failed to see that the peasant's total tax bill was not reduced
onc whit by having him make his payments to the duty soldier rather than to the
district magistrate. Furthermore, the support taxpayer system was also flawed
because treating military service as a tax rather than required days of training
and service contributed to the general weakening of military defense. Even though
the militia model may have been impossible to achieve or even impractical for
a country needing a standing army of trained troops, at least it placed empha-
sis on the need for providing partial training for the whole male population. The
support system, by contrast, already represented a transition from service to tax
payments, and it was too easy in times of fiscal crisis to turn to it as a source of
additional revenue. Inklings of this weakness were already present even by Yu's
death in 1672. Furthermore, even Yu himself acknowledged that support per-
sonnel were paying taxes (!) rather than simply providing equipment or rations
to duty soldiers because he also proposed setting a fair tax rate for them. Unfor-
tunately, his proposed two-p'il tax rate was anachronistic at the time he sug-
gested it because active officials were already pointing out that it was too high
and induced many olIlcials to sign up tax evaders for service at the lower, one-
p 'il rate.
It was certainly no secret to anyone at the time that the main reason why the
financial support system for the military was in such tenihlc condition in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was because the tax hase was shrinking
as hoth bona fide yangban and commoner tax shirkers successfully gained