Secretary Board

The Secretary Board (中記中錄室, trung-keqs-trung-rwak-stit), or more literally Office of Records and Dictations, is the most senior operations department of the Consolidated Army of Themiclesia. It is responsible for converting and communicating the Government's military objectives and instructions, as revealed by the Secretary of State for Defence and junior ministers in the Ministry of Defence or their representatives, to other army commanders down the hierarchy.

History

Before 1800

The term trung-keqs-trung-rwak-stit is a portmanteau of two separate names, the trung-keqs-stit and the trung-rwak-stit. The former is a common name for a group of secretaries around important officials who took dictation and thus relieved the official of the more time-consuming duty of writing down his letters. The trung-rwak-stit was responsible for making copies of documents. The Secretary Board arose around the Secretary of State for Officials (吏曹尚書), who was one of three main secretaries around the Emperor, the other two being the secretaries for envoys and for barons.

Interestingly, management of the country's army was not the main duty of this secretary but instead of other officials, yet it was necessary to obtain royal assent to military decisions, so draft commands were collected by the secretary anyway and presented by him to the emperor. There was thus a distance between the "brainstorming" part of the bureaucracy and the "deciding" part.

Nevertheless, during the 17th century, consecutive rulers sought to manage the country's army more actively and so lodged more instructions and decisions with the secretary of state, who then deposited them with his own secretaries. With the appointment of Lord Prem in 1622, who was an avid tactician and left a private collection of over 1,000 military essays, most of the trung-keqs-stit became occupied with defence-related matters, while a new group of secretaries were appointed for other business.

In 1632, the role of the Secretary of State for Officials was further enlarged when the royal court passed laws to require him to read all documents from generals in the field, which in this era was mostly transmarine (i.e. across the sea, in the Subcontinent); this part of its duty is thought to have come at the expense

1800 – 1916

After the failures of the Second Maverican War, ministers began work on a more coherent system of managing the nation's army as early as 1798. Disarmament under the Baron of Gar between 1796 and 1805 completed, much work re-consolidated under the central government, having previously been within the competences of generals in the field. In 1807, the Secretary of State for Officials was directed by a new statute to read all letters addressed to the Emperor relating to the assignment and movement of troops, whether in defensive or field arrangements, whereas those relating to victualing, mobilization, and logistics were granted to the Secretary of State for Barons. By extension, the existing office of the trung-keqs-stit was enjoined to keep close records of the daily movements and activities of all military units (as revealed by mandatory daily reports), in case the information was needed.

The collation of this information was believed to enable better instruction from a distance, since units in the field may not necessarily know where strategically favourable locations are. The military historian Ascott records that the Baron of Kan, then Secretary for Officials, said that the Secretary Board under his administration had become more knowledgeable about the goings-on of battles than any unit in the field; what follows, to the Baron, was a favourable position for ministers to make decisions on the basis of this information.

The Secretary Board started to work more directly with the Field Marshal's Board (令㷉中記室), it seems, during the administration of the Chief Baron of Ran.

1916 – 1956

The Secretary Board, as its name suggests, began as a group of close secretaries taking dictation from the Secretary of State, but in modern times uniformed military officers predominate in terms of number in the Secretary Board. The practice of appointing uniformed officers to the Secretary Board was enabled by the Staff Officers Act which passed Parliament in 1919; the Act authorized the Government to appoint military officers that were not part of a field unit such as a regiment or company, in various advisory or administrative capacities. The Act was in the vein of other acts which placed more services and agencies, formerly part of the ordinary bureaucracy or even in private hands, into uniform. The public rationale for this policy change was that the ordinary bureaucracy was already overburdened with serving other government policies, and the sudden strain of war could place channels of communication at risk of collapse or paralysis; however, historians note that into the last quarter of the 19th century, a growing number of government departments existed solely for the defence of the realm, and it seemed reasonable that they could be grouped together with the field units on that basis on the grounds of professionalism.

The growth of the uniformed staff was a slow process, but in the Secretary Board it was especially slow because its role was considered more bureaucratic and secretarial than technical, which could be argued to characterize the new uniformed services (like the Convalescence Service or the Central Engineering Department). Presidents of the Board usually signed order papers without question after the Senior Secretary to the Board signed, and he was by statutory requirement a civil official; as such, while it was lawful to appoint staff military officers to the Board in a drafting (and thus operational) capacity, only the Board's expansion at the start of the Pan-Septentrion War prompted the Government to do so routinely. Even then, military officers were appointed "in attendance" to the Board, and all drafts needed at least an under-secretary's signature to be sent out. Certain kinds of draft commands, called "drafts on the restriction list" during the PSW, required successively more senior officials' signatures, but the exact content of the restriction list was kept secret from staff officers attending to the Board and would remain that way until 1955.

Nevertheless, for the most part, secretaries' conscientious deference to staff officers' professional judgement seems to have fostered a reasonably harmonious relationship at the Board. This informal understanding became semi-official in 1942 under a circular printed by the Senior Secretary, advising not to alter the text of the draft operation orders and instead affix their opinions in the margins in case of uncertainties. By all accounts, the increase in the scale and complexity of battlefield arrangements seems to have confined secretaries to the role of supervisors, almost as a third party, that operational commands drafted by staff officers did not exceed the bounds of Government authorization and intentions.

In 1943, the Government obtained an amendment to the Staff Officers Act, permitting the appointment of "Senior Attending Staff Officers". Their function was to answer an assistant-secretary's doubts, from a professional perspective, as to whether an operational command was within the bounds set by the Government; thus, an assistant-secretary's objection would go to the SASO first before reaching the under-secretary or deputy-secretary, and the latter would have a professional opinion to rely on before issuing their own opinions as to whether an operational command was within authority.

After 1956

After the end of the PSW, the Government issued royal commissions to study lessons that the war may provide for future usage, and one commission was to study rationalization of decisions in the armed forces. The word "rationalization" here, at least as intended by the Liberal government, means that decisions should be made at the place where they should be implemented, as much as possible, in the interest of efficiency. The royal commission's conclusion was mainly that decisions can be reliably made at a local level provided that information and co-ordination is readily available but notes that information synthesis is difficult at a very local level and co-ordination even more so, if the decision was not expected. This contrasted with the earlier philosophy of withholding decisions to the highest possible level and only to delegate when absolutely required by pressure.

The Government, in its 1953 Defence Statement, judged that a compromise amidst the conflicts noted by the royal commission could be made by drawing up more extensive contingencies (with broader and further provisions) under which a decision made a more local level can be both foreseen and supported in advance. For the operations-oriented Secretary Board, this means that operational commands would become even more complex and technical and required more co-ordination with financial and logistical authorities. According to an official who experienced the transition while serving at the Board in the mid-50s, the Government started having much vaguer defence policies, according to which staff officers drew up contingencies, operations, and conditional delegations. With rather nebulous instructions, secretaries serving at the Board saw the need to supervise operational command drafts become less important, as most drafts (or contingencies) could now fairly be regarded as "within authority".

Contrary to the formerly-common belief that the Secretary Board was dominated by military staff since the Board's expansion in 1935, that transition seems to have taken place around 1955 – 56 according to memoirs, and many historians find more merit in the later date.

Structure

• 卒史
• 長史

See also

• Themiclesia
• Consolidated Army
• Standing Liaison Committee
• General Staff Office