DEBATE OVER MILITARY TRAINING AGENCY 449
the battalion commanders and platoon leaders. Good ones could do the job in
one or two days. otherwise it could take as much as ten days. This discussion
called into question Yu H yongw6n's assumption that the levcl of troop training
and skill under a rotating service system could be maintained by periodic train-
ing sessions while the troops were off duty at home.
The Annual Selection of Unregistered MenSeveral officials expressed the view that a major reason for the shortage of pos-
sible recruits was that too many men, both yangban and those posing as students
in schools or military officials (kllll'gwan) had illicitly gained exemption from
military service. These views reinforced Yi Wan's point about the difficulty of
finding new men for service, given the restraints of the existing social system.
The government had not neglected the problem entirely because it regularly sent
out agents to enroll men who had escaped registration by one means or another,
but these periodic registration campaigns could be quite severe and caused the
public justification for complaint. Ch'oe Husang, for example, pointed out later
that day that one of the main grievances of the common people in the country-
side was "the annual selection" (scr/z 0) or recmitment of unregistered adult men
(hanjong) which resulted not in an honest enlistment of draft dodgers but the
illegal signing up of "children, youths, and babes in swaddling clothes." He com-
plained that the fundamental cause ofthis registration campaign was not evasion
of service but the excessively high ratio of three support taxpayers (pongjok) for
every duty soldier in the Military Training Agency. Royal Division, and Robust
Select Soldiers (Changch'o), a ratio that was double the peacetime ratio. This
point is important because Yu Hyongwon had himself adopted a three-to-one ratio
to provide support for the duty soldiers in hi~ reformed system, not fully appre-
ciating the pressure this increased ratio of support taxpayers to duty soldiers would
put on the commoner population. In any case, Ch'oe did not elicit much of a reac-
tion from King Hyonjong, who brushed off his complaints ahout the evils asso-
ciated with the registration process as a minor issue.^14
During the court conference Hyonjong had asked his officials to determine
the number of unregistered "idle adult males" (hanjong) available throughout
the country in oreler to judge the feasibility of recruiting new soldiers on the
basis of the rotating service and support taxpayer system. The next month Hi)
Ch6k reported that there were 54,000 hanjong in the country, of which about
43,890 could not be considered for service because they already held office or
other (nonmilitary?) service obligations or were official or private slaves. One
wonders why those who had official posts or other service obligations should
have been registered as hanjOllg in the first place unless the term itself really
meant some thing like "all those unregistered for military service," with or with-
out a legitimate reason, rather than idle scions of yangban families. It is also
clear, from the above statement, that despite the importance of the sog'o slave
soldiers to the overall military picture, at this time no one wanted to assign slaves