DEBATE OVER MILITARY TRAINING AGENCY 443
inordinate expansion in the troops of the agency as well as other capital divi-
sions OCCUlTed. After Injo appointed leaders of the coup against King Kwang-
haegun to the position of commander (Taejang) of the capital guard divisions,
the chief ministers of state at the time, who did not want to be bothered handling
military affairs, turned control of the capital guards over to them. Originally the
capital guard divisions were filled only with residents of the capital, but these
divisional commanders began to increase the size of their units by recruiting peas-
ants from the remote provinces to build up the units under their control. The men
so conscripted had to "leave their parents and abandon their land," as Yu put it,
because long-term service meant permanent residence in the capital.
In the case of those capital soldiers financed by support personnel, the gov-
ernment raised the cloth support tax from two to three p'i!, and Military Train-
ing Agency officers also began to sign up extra support personnel without
authorization from higher authority, even at times excusing soldiers from their
rotating shifts of duty to collect substitute payments (kap () from them instead.
In other words, the expansion of the agency was caused by the unauthorized
partial conversion of the unit to a support taxpayer system that Yu had adopted
as the basis of his reorganization plan.
Furthermore, the treatment of the soldiers recently added to the agency by its
commanders was by no means gentle. They would not allow the district mag-
istrates to grant exemptions to old soldiers of the Military Training agency when
they reached retirement age and find substitutes for them. Instead, "they had
them dragged by the hair all the way to the agency's main base in the capital to
go on duty. And the commanders gave free rein to the clerks of the agency to
demand bribes from the men."!
The problems of thc agency, however, were not confined to the actions of its
commanders. Yu was particularly critical of the behavior of its musketeers and
horse soldiers in the capital because they had turned to hanging around the cap-
ital marketplaces trying to make as much money as they could. Almost all the
troops had, in fact, gone into business and competed with established merchants.
Some of them persuaded their commanders to obtain special exemptions from
commercial taxes for them. In general, Yu condemned most of them for being
extremely "idle, lazy, and arrogant."2
Nonetheless, Yu was willing to retain the Military Training Agency because
of its important troop-training functions, but only if reforms were made in its
operations. To bring it under the control of civil officials and prevent political
appointments, he stipulated that all officers from division commander (Taejang)
to battalion commander (P'ach'ong) be appointed on the basis of recommenda-
tions from the Ministry of War. The two main staff officers under the divisional
commander in charge of military affairs and infantry, respectively (the Chung-
gun and Ch'onch'ong), who were currently appointed by the commander him-
self, would be recommended only after consultation between the Ministry of
War and the State Council.
Finally, he proposed a total conversion of the agency's system of Jlnance to