448 MILIT AR Y REFORM
and Hy6njong now expressed his desire to preserve the Military Training Agency
by transferring 10,000 men from other units to it.
H6 Ch6k supported the king, reminding him that the reason why Song Siy61
had proposed reducing the agency by attrition was because he believed that finan-
cial support for its soldiers had depleted the state's reserves, but he opposed the
idea on the grounds that elimination of the agency would cause more serious
problems than its retention, H6, however, was less concerned with finance than
with the lack of order and discipline in the agency, a problem that could be solved
just by getting the right people to lead it.
Min Ch6ngjung and Hy6njong also chimed in that "you just have to have cap-
ital soldiers," H6 Ch6k later said that in easy times, you could muster a force
of 20,000 men, but in hard times, you could get no more than a thousand. Yu
Hy6gy6n noted his concern that there were only 6,000 Military Agency soldiers
in the capital (down 2.000 from the number Yi Wan had been able to recruit?),
who in wartime would have to leave the capital with the supreme field com-
mander (Towtmsu) dispatched to command the armies in the field, leaving a force
of only 3,000 soldiers as the king's personal retinue. [2
Yi Wan brought the discussion back to reality by again calling into question
the feasibility of the support taxpayer system of finance. He did not believe that
the Royal Division model constituted an efficient way of paying for soldiers
through support taxpayers because it was almost impossible to find new men
not already encumbered by service or tax obligations, He reminded Hy6njong
that to provide for a force of only 1,000 men on duty at anyone time (sang bon )
in the Royal Division, it was necessary to sign up 20,000 "heads of households
[hosu]" to serve as rotating soldiers and another 60,000 men to act as support
taxpayers, a task extremely difficult to achieve in current circumstances. When
the discussion turned to the problem of retaining the Military Training Agency,
Yi Wan again remarked that the system of rotating duty soldiers and support
taxpayers was flawed as a system of finance because you either had to find 8,000
men to support every 1,000 troops on duty or have the Ministry of Taxation make
up the shortage in rations. [.1
Off-duty Rotating Duty Soldiers Lose Their EdgeSpokesmen for retention of the agency became more vigorous in their arguments
as they realized that the reform suggested by Song Siy61 would sacrifice mili-
tary strength at the capital for proposed savings of questionable value. Hy6njong
said that the best troops he had were those of the agency, and H6 Ch6k argued
that long-term service was better than the rotating service system because it
ensured that the troops would always be in a state of readiness! To be sure, when
rotating duty soldiers were called up from the provinces for short-term duty,
they were trained night and day and "left no time to rest," but they soon lost
their edge after they returned home. Yi Wan agreed, and Yu Hy6gy6n added that
the time it look to get men back into fighting shape depended on the skills of