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.
Duties
History
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 Official (吏曹尚書), who was one of three 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.
Since the
Structure
- 卒史
- 長史