534 MILITARY REFORM
admonitions had little effect on transforming the military system and solving
its problems.CONCL USION
In many ways Yu Hyongwon was not a rigid or dogmatic fundamentalist in his
approach to military reform. It would be better to say that he sought compro-
mises - between the ideal of antiquity and the circumstances of contemporary
Korea, between the need for fiscal rcstraint and the need for a strong defense,
and between central civilian political control and decentralized military force
and authority. It is not clear, however, that his compromises yielded fully satis-
fying solutions to the problems of military organization at the time.
His plans were not simply the product of rational calculation because he
depended heavily on institutions ofthc early Choson period and traditional Korean
practice. His preference for the Five Guards and the rotating service and sup-
port taxpayer system happened to constitute the methods of organization, ser-
vice, and finance in operation at the beginning of the dynasty. For that matter,
his retention of certain elite guard units to protect the sons of the elite against
the loss of status that might ensue from duty alongside commoners also repro-
duced rules in effect in the early Choson period that were social compromises
with principles of efficiency, rationality, mcrit, and equality. His strict separa-
tion of slave from commoner soldiers and relocating all slaves in the sog'o units
was not, however, based on any precedent since there were no slaves in the army
in any numbers until the Imjin War, but then they had been combined with com-
moners in the sog'o units. His reform represented a retention but separation of
slave military service, a double retreat from his professed ideal of abolition.
His almost visceral dislike for permanent, salaried soldiers was argued on the
grounds of financial rationality, but it was really more a product of a bias learned
from Confucian scholars of the past, both Chinese and Korean, and his own prej-
udice against the crude behavior of the Military Training Agency troops in his
own time. Although neither a blind fundamentalist nor a literal admirer of antiq-
uity or early Choson, he retained a basic reverence for antiquity reinforced by
a somewhat idealized vision of early Choson institutions and respect (or fear)
of upsetting long-standing social practices in his own time.
His scheme for the reorganization of palace and capital guard forces was not
simply an antiquarian scheme for the restoration of early Choson institutions,
it was also a reaction to a situation that prevailed throughout the seventeenth
century. Outside of a brief reference to the political guard commanders of the
I 620S and their tendcncy to increasc their forces, he refrained from any detailed
discussion of the relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics to
the capital guards. Nevertheless, his appreciation of the matter is implicit in his
formula for reform: limiting the entire guard force to about 2,000 men, elimi-
nating all new units created since 1592 save for the Military Training Agency,
and then converting the mode of organization and finance of that agency. The