Marshal Hao Bainian's retirement is the most sensational event at the end of this year.
However, Ying Yikang's promotion to Army Lieutenant General was also a sensational event.
Because this is the only general in the empire who was promoted to lieutenant general before the age of thirty-five after the Unification War. He is the only one in both the army and the navy.
During the Unification War, there were lieutenant generals and even generals in their twenties, let alone thirty-five years old.
However, after the Unification War, the promotion of generals became very standardized. Many people took many years to advance to the next level. Generally speaking, those with little future would not be able to make it even if they survived. In the end, there were a large number of generals who could not make it.
They are all looking for another way out, and many choose to retire and enter politics.
In the past twenty years, anyone who can become a major general before the age of 40 is considered young and promising, and those who become a lieutenant general before the age of 40 are considered phoenix-haired water chestnuts.
As for the one who became a lieutenant general at the age of thirty-five, the only one was Ying Yikang!
The reason why Ying Yikang climbed so fast is inseparable from his outstanding military talent.
He was super awesome when he was in the military academy, and he became even more awesome after he entered the army. Otherwise, he would not have made a lot of army bosses look at him differently, and he would have become an army major general before he was thirty years old.
In the past few years, he has been staying in the Western Regions, leading troops in Central Asia, and has made outstanding achievements.
However, just his military exploits in the field army were not enough to make him a leader among the new generation of generals. More importantly, while leading troops on the front line to fight, he was also constantly improving the various military theories of the Tang Army.
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When he served as the deputy chief of staff of the Western Expeditionary Army Headquarters, he was mainly responsible for logistics affairs. At that time, in order to better support the troops' operations in Central Asia, he improved and developed a complete logistics and transportation system.
Although everyone knows that logistics transportation should be based on railways and shipping. After arriving at the front line, it will be transported to the front line combat troops by horse-drawn carriages, but this is only a general concept.
However, Ying Yikang improved these general concepts and finally formulated a complete logistics and transportation system.
Fully guaranteed the operations of the Western Expeditionary Army fighting in Central Asia.
This year, he took some time off from his busy schedule to come up with a new type of infantry-artillery coordination tactic based on the application of rifled rifles and rifled artillery.
Although the Tang Dynasty has always had infantry and artillery coordination tactics, the old infantry and artillery coordination tactics are no longer applicable in the era of new rifled weapons.
While the effective range of weapons has been greatly improved, tactics must also follow suit.
To this end, he proposed a new type of infantry-artillery coordination tactics. According to his new infantry-artillery coordination tactics, the Army even revised the infantry and artillery drills, which shows the influence of his new infantry-artillery coordination tactics.
Before Hao Bainian accepted the rank of field marshal, the last trick he made was to ask Li Xuan to reuse the outstanding generals of the new generation in a reasonable manner. He said that with the innovation of military technology and the changes in tactics, these older generation generals were already outdated and only the new era's generals were needed.
Only generals can make full use of it.
Although he was not talking about Ying Yikang alone, Ying Yikang was the leader among this new generation of generals.
Therefore, Ying Yikang's promotion was actually a free ride.
The Holy Emperor Li Xuan also admired Yi Kang. After all, in the military, whether it was the army or the navy, there were only a few outstanding generals of the new generation. It was difficult for Li Xuan not to notice them.
Li Xuan basically kept these new generation of outstanding generals in his mind and inspected them while training them.
And this Ying Yikang's performance made Li Xuan quite satisfied.
As a latecomer, Li Xuan naturally knew the subsequent changes in military tactics. Front-mounted rifled weapons were just a transition, and rear-mounted rifled weapons were the future.
And when breech-loading rifled weapons come out, the line tactics currently used can basically be thrown into the garbage heap of history, and skirmishing tactics are the future.
As for Ying Yikang, before he saw the breech-loading rifled rifle, he had already proposed skirmishing tactics based on the small number of existing breech-loading rifled howitzers and Mini rifles.
And around breech-loaded rifled weapons, a series of tactical ideas were put forward. Although some of the suggestions were nonsense in Li Xuan's opinion, they had historical limitations at the time.
It is not as powerful as Ying Yikang, and it is impossible to accurately predict all future tactical changes.
However, Ying Yikang was still able to grasp several key points and proposed a series of interesting tactical changes.
This was actually the reason why Li Xuan asked him to serve as deputy chief of staff and director of the combat department.
The era of breech-loaded rifled weapons has begun, and few people in the entire army know how to use these more advanced weapons. Although Ying Yikang's construction has many flaws, it is also one of the only ones that can
The person who proposed relatively complete tactical innovations.
With such a talent, it would be impossible for him to be unimportant.
Ying Yikang's promotion to Army Lieutenant General made many people envious and jealous, including his old classmate and subordinate Bi Zhian.
When I heard the news, I could only look up to the sky and be speechless: Comparing people to each other is so annoying!
Speaking of age, Bi Zhian is two years older than Ying Yikang. The thirty-seven-year-old Bi Zhian actually does not do badly among the younger generation of officers, especially among his classmates at the same time.
He has military merit and qualifications, and his background is not bad. He is now an Army colonel, and this year he was transferred to the Eighth Division as the commander of the 23rd Infantry Regiment.
This is the colonel commander of the infantry regiment of the standing main division. Basically, the colonels sitting in this position are all trained talents.
However, the gap between the thirty-seven-year-old colonel commander and the thirty-five-year-old lieutenant general deputy chief of staff is huge.
To say that Bi Zhian is not envious is definitely a lie.
Even he was a little jealous!
But on the other hand, as an old classmate and old subordinate of Lieutenant General Ying Yikang, he was also branded as Ying Yikang's faction within the army.
Ying Yikang continues to rise, and what can be expected in the future is that as long as Ying Yikang doesn't make mistakes or die midway, becoming a general is a sure thing.
The future army bosses are his old classmates and old bosses.
This is also very beneficial to Bi Zhian's own development. As long as he works hard, he may not be able to cross the threshold of becoming a major general in the future.
By then, the old father should be satisfied!
But what he didn't expect was that when he went home during the vacation at the beginning of the year, he would be criticized.
As soon as he entered the door, his father yelled at him: "How can you discipline your eldest son? He actually applied for the Imperial Academy. The descendants of the Bi family, who usually hang out with a bunch of scornful scholars, dare to apply for the Imperial Academy. They are simply thrown into the trap."
It hurts my Bi family’s face!”
"It's okay if you didn't want to make progress back then. Why did you allow him to toss about poetry!"
"My Bi family has been in the military for generations, and the men of the Bi family are all heroes on the battlefield. He dares to apply for the Imperial Academy and even talks about taking the imperial examination. Doesn't it make the world laugh at me because I have no one in the Bi family!"
Listening to his father's words, Bi Zhi'an was silent for a moment, but finally said: "Quan'er and I talked about applying for the Imperial College, and I approved it!"
He actually wanted to say that our Bi family has no genes for military talent!
In the eyes of outsiders, the Bi family can be regarded as a standard military aristocratic family in the empire. His father retired with the rank of major general and was awarded the title of viscount.
He is also a colonel in the army. It is very likely that he will become a general in the future. If he performs meritorious service in the future, he may be rewarded with the original title instead of a reduced rank.
However, he knew very well that the children of the Bi family were really not suitable for joining the army.
Among the three Bi Zhi'an brothers, he was the only one who studied hard for many years and was admitted to the martial arts school. After more than ten years in the army, with Ying Yikang's help, he became a colonel. Although he can expect to be a general in the future, his family
He knows his own family affairs, but he really has no military talent.
And his sons and nephews are all a bunch of idiots. Although they all started attending the Army Primary School when they were young, they can be considered to have studied military affairs since childhood, and they studied very hard, but if they don't have talent, they don't have talent.
Every time I took the annual exam, I was at the bottom.
My eldest son was not much better off. After attending the Army Primary School, he failed to get into the Royal Youth Military Academy and was finally forced to study in the general preparatory course.
When he was applying for the exam this year, his eldest son talked with him all night. The nineteen-year-old man knelt down and begged him to let him apply for the Imperial College. He was unwilling to apply for the martial arts school.
Then he cried and said that it was not that he had not worked hard, he had worked hard, harder than the people around him, and he also wanted to continue serving in the army for the Bi family and win back the rank of general.
But if he really can’t learn it, what can he do?
Looking at various books on military theory, sand table exercises are all punished. It is basically impossible to apply for a martial arts school with such qualities.
On the contrary, in terms of liberal arts, he was extremely talented and did not study much, but his liberal arts scores were excellent. Even the teachers in the preparatory school said that he was born to study liberal arts.
At that time, Bi Zhi'an also recalled that when he was young, there was a time when he also liked poetry and articles the most, but because of his father's compulsion, he finally applied for the martial arts school and got the lowest grade. After entering the army and serving in the army, he was lost among everyone.
If he hadn't met Ying Yikang and received Ying Yikang's support, he probably wouldn't have been able to become a major now, and would have been forced to retire at the rank of captain.
Seeing his son like that, Bi Zhi'an softened. He didn't want his son to follow his own path, so he allowed him to apply for the Imperial College.
As a result, he successfully passed the exam and ranked among the top in admission scores, which made him quite gratified.
As for his father's anger, he had already anticipated it!
Bi's father was still there cursing, and when he saw Bi Zhi'an was silent all the time, he suddenly became silent too.
Finally he waved and said: "Go and see your mother!"
Watching his son leave, the already elderly Bi's father stood in front of the window, then sighed deeply, looking out the window, the scene in Huangzhushan that year came to mind again!
That year, Huangzhushan was facing an attack by the Ming army. Shengtianzi organized young men to form a Guards. Few people, not even his son and wife, knew about it.
At that time, he was among the Guards that only had more than 40 people.
Even when the Guards were first training, he was Hao Bainian's corps commander!
But soon, Hao Bainian and Li Chunjing soared into the sky, while he could only be promoted step by step, and then gradually be forgotten.
By the time of the Battle of Wuzhou, Hao Bainian and the others were already commanders of an army, but he was still just a major and battalion commander.
Moreover, his poor performance when he led his troops and other friendly forces to attack Wuzhou had a great negative impact on his subsequent promotion.
During the years of the Unification War, he watched helplessly as people with military ranks similar to or even lower than him surpassed him, and then became the founding generals of the country.
But he slowly disappeared from everyone's sight!
Even the rank of Major General and the title of Viscount were given to him because he was a long-time emperor and the Holy Emperor took pity on him as an old minister.