2005 Menghean military reforms
The 2005 military reforms adopted in Menghe were part of a comprehensive effort to restructure and improve the Menghean Army and Navy during the second half of the 2000s. The changes were motivated by the disastrous performance of the Menghean armed forces in the Ummayan Civil War, where a Menghean intervention force succeeded in propping up a Taleyan rebel insurrection in the south but suffered severe casualties in engagements with Sieuxerrian and Tyrannian forces. The war brought the first engagements between Menghean combatants and a parity Casaterran military since 1964, and revealed serious deficiencies in Menghean capabilities.
Choe Sŭng-min convened a series of meetings of the General Staff in the spring of 2005 to discuss the poor performance of the Army and Navy in Ummayah, calling for "honest self-criticism and a plan for fundamental changes." The Ministry of National Defense issued a proclamation on June 5th stating that the armed forces would undergo "comprehensive reform in all areas," the first public acknowledgement that reforms were underway. Internal memos to individual units and departments gave more specific instructions.
The initial "self-criticism and introspection" period involved a series of resignations by high-profile officials, followed by a broader personnel shakeup of the middle administrative ranks, as politically motivated appointees from the 1990s were replaced by a new generation of theorists. A parallel campaign attacked corruption in the Army procurement department and severed many of the Army's civilian economic holdings. More material changes included new uniforms, new weaponry, longer and more selective conscription terms, improved armor and electronics for vehicles, and new developments in tactics and operations which granted more autonomy to lower-level commanders. Simultaneously, the size of the Menghean Army's standing force was increased to meet the border threat from Maverica and Innominada, and the Navy received authorization to build a third aircraft carrier. To support the increased costs, military spending broadly and research and development spending in particular increased sharply, and work began on a number of new weapons projects.
Background
The motive for the 2005 military reforms can be traced back to the deep budget cuts of the late 1980s and early 1990s. After coming to power in the Decembrist Revolution, Choe Sŭng-min normalized relations with Dayashina and the major Western powers, and declared that his government would prioritize economic growth. As a result of these shifts in priority, military spending fell sharply from 1988 to 1993, and for nine of the next ten years it grew at a slower pace than GDP.
The Menghean Navy reacted to tight budgets by focusing on quality over quantity, modernizing its large-combatant force but reducing the number of missile and torpedo craft. The Menghean Army made steep cuts in new procurement, shifting to a reserve-centric low-readiness force that mostly relied on old equipment. Training and readiness in both forces lapsed. Hundreds of aircraft were moved into reserve storage, some of them in climate-controlled hangars but many in open fields and rudimentary warehouses.
Having come to power with the help of the Menghean People's Army, Choe Sŭng-min was wary of making any moves that could provoke a counter-coup. Initial force reduction efforts in 1988 and 1989 were carried out under the guise of political purges of Communist sympathizers, and officers who wished to remain in the Armed Forces had to pass political loyalty tests. Promotion was also came to emphasize political loyalty rather than skill or ability, as Choe consolidated his power and built up a cult of personality.
Corruption in the armed forces also became a major problem during this period. In a further move to soften military unrest and discourage coups, Army and Navy staff departments began to reward laid-off and underpaid officers by encouraging them to start personal enterprises. This mirrored the existing practice of encouraging Socialist Party cadres to "jump into the sea" of private business. Under the Second New Five-Year Plan's "beehive campaign" to boost economic growth, military units were tasked with contributing to the economy directly: on-base farms and workshops, inherited from the military-centric economy of the DPRM, became the basis for de-facto private businesses run by officers. This phenomenon was especially acute in the Army, which organized large numbers of conscripts into "special construction brigades" to build roads, harvest crops, and even work in factories. Corruption was also a bottom-up phenomenon, as officers paid increasingly generous bribes in exchange for promotions and administrative posts.
Combat lessons
Polvokian Civil War
Ummayan Civil War
Major reforms
Volunteer enlisted troops
Prior to the 2005 reforms, all enlisted personnel in the Menghean Armed Forces were conscripts serving one-year terms. Conscripts could re-enlist, but they received the same dismal pay, and retention rates were very low. While this approach was adequate for a low-skill, manpower-heavy military, MoND reform planners concluded that it was increasingly inefficient in a modernizing military. A growing number of technical posts required expert training, and the prior practice of staffing these posts with lieutenant-grade officers was inadequate.
To address the problem, both the Army and the Navy established a separate category of volunteer personnel. Conscripts were (and are) only paid a small monthly allowance, which in 2004 was equal to ₩2,500 ($168 in 2020 SSD), on the rationale that the military covered their room, board, food, and equipment. Volunteer pay, by contrast, started at ₩66,000 ($4,201) per year, with a ₩25,000 ($1,651) sign-up bonus. Though small in absolute terms, the volunteer wage was half of GDP per capita and close to the median income, making re-enlistment financially attractive. Personnel become eligible to enlist as volunteers after finishing their required service time as conscripts, and volunteers enlist for repeatable four-year tours.
The first cohorts of volunteers were posted to technical positions with high training requirements, especially radar, sonar, and missile operators. They were also assigned to non-commissioned officer positions, and in 2009 the Menghean Army announced that it had ended the practice of assigning conscripts to squad-level command positions in active units. As the share of volunteers in the Armed Forces increased, conscripts were also posted to semi-skilled positions in engineering and maintenance. By 2014, a number of Kimsŏng divisions in the Army employed volunteers in front-line combat posts.
Conscript training also improved during the reforms. The conscript service period increased from 12 months to 24, and then 30: four months of training, two years of active service, and two months of reserve familiarization. To raise morale, conscript stipends were quadrupled from ₩2,500 to ₩10,000 and annually adjusted for cost-of-living changes in future years. The Army and Navy both worked to improve the quality of on-base housing, benefiting from a broader program to promote contruction around the country.
Increase in readiness
Not all of the lessons of the 2005 military reforms were learned on the battlefield. As the Army and Navy brought tanks and aircraft out of the strategic reserves to support the rapid uptick in forces in late 2005, they found that long-term storage had taken a greater toll than anticipated. As many as 50% of all aircraft reactivated by Navy Aviation were struck from the register as "not serviceable." Many of those that were reactivated required months of intensive maintenance before they could fly, and had to be fitted with spare parts cannibalized from other units or ordered new from factories. A plan to reactivate decommissioned ships destined for the scrapyard was rejected altogether. Land vehicles fared better, but many still required heavy maintenance before they could be delivered to the front lines.
This experience forced the Ministry of National Defense to seriously rethink its strategic doctrine. Previously, especially during the 1990s, the MoND had banked on a strategy of small active forces with deep reserves, allowing a large wartime force with small peacetime spending. Menghean analysts now concluded that this was not viable. The Army and Navy both increased their force readiness levels in the years that followed, and essentially eliminated reservist aviation units. The Army retained its layered system of active, mobilization reserve, and homeland defense units, but adjusted their ratio to 1:2:4, and later 1:1:2.
This change also brought about a major shift in doctrinal thinking. Reasoning that hostile forces would require a similar time to draw up their forces, both the Army and Navy emphasized the notion of "first strike advantage." This meant maintaining an active force large enough to execute offensive operations, and carrying out massed air, artillery, and missile strikes on enemy units in the opening phase of a conflict, in the hopes of inflicting decisive damage on grounded aircraft and parked vehicles before they could be brought into action. This also resulted in an emphasis on pre-emptive or even preventative war, as gradual escalation could allow the enemy to gain a first-strike advantage or at least bring its reserves into play. War plans drawn up in this period stressed the importance of striking critical enemy bases immediately at the start of any conflict, even if it meant initiating hostilities without direct provocation. Limited conflict could concede the mid-war advantage to the enemy, so any initiatiation of hostilities would immediately proceed to full-scale conflict.
In tandem with this first-strike focus, the Navy and (to a lesser degree) the Army emphasized the desirability of a short but decisive conflict. In most plans and exercises, the primary goal was to inflict sufficiently heavy damage that the opposing country would sue for peace. At sea, this would mean sinking all carrier battle groups in the area of operations, and on land it would mean encircling the enemy's active forces and seizing strategic positions in the enemy's operational depth. A short war, perhaps lasting two weeks to one month, would not give Maverica time to conscript new forces, and would not give the Entente Cordiale members time to ship in reinforcements from Casaterra or develop nuclear weapons. It would also minimize the economic burden of prolonged total mobilization, and reduce the number of precision-guided munitions to be stockpiled in peacetime.
Critics of the first-strike doctrine, both domestically and abroad, warned that it would increase the risk of a second world war by leaving no room for error or de-escalation. It also gave the EC an incentive to treat any increase in unusual Menghean military activity as evidence of a first strike in preparation. Internal MoND guidelines scored wargames and exercises based on the extent of damage to enemy forces and bases, such that de-escalating a crisis was punished, not rewarded. Independent analysts, including some in Menghe, also questioned the widespread assumption that the EC would sue for peace after losing a sufficient portion of its at-sea carrier assets: few wargames and exercises considered scenarios in which the EC continued fighting in the long term, instead treating sufficient carrier sinkings as an automatic victory condition.
Anti-corruption effort
As training and readiness improved, the Menghean government also moved behind the scenes to fight corruption. While the June 5th proclamation made no explicit mention of corruption - a sensitive topic best kept out of the public record - it was a major topic of internal investigations and self-criticism sessions. In the summer and autumn of 2005, a slew of high-ranking officers were placed under investigation and dismissed from their posts on charges of embezzling funds and trading bribes for promotions. With the major patrons of the corruption web under control, the Military Discipline Inspection Agency followed up with a thorough purge of the lower ranks, and forced many bases to sell off their side businesses.
An internal Ministry of National Defense regulation passed in 2007 formally prohibited military personnel from operating for-profit enterprises while on active duty. This sweeping change forced the divestment of the remaining military-linked enterprises, as well as the practice of assigning conscripts to construction projects. Exemptions were made for licensed defense contractors and on-base shops and restaurants for personnel, and reservists were still permitted to work in the private sector, though they could be investigated and punished if they violated a vague clause against "unduly exploiting military status for market advantage."
To compensate for the loss of side income, the Ministry of National Defense doubled average officer wages between 2004 and 2008, a move which was also intended to increase enlistment and retention.
Organization changes
Changes in training and readiness also brought about changes in military organization. Rather than reorganize all units simultaneously, the Army divided its active and reserve forces into distinct tranches based on their equipment, reorganizing new-generation units but retaining old ones. The initial classification, approved in 2005, divided divisions into three categories:
- 1st Generation refers to units which are not fully motorized, or which have soft-skinned transport lorries but no armored squad transports.
- 2nd Generation refers to fully mechanized units which have APCs and IFVs for all squads, but which follow pre-reform organization.
- 3rd Generation refers to fully mechanized units which were reorganized in line with the first set of reform guidelines and which have received newer equipment.
Later, in 2016, the Menghean Army added a "4th Generation" category for units which were reorganized in line with a second set of reforms.
The 3rd Generation of unit organization uses the 2nd generation organization as a base, but makes a number of changes and additions. The most notable of these was the addition of more supporting weapons at the company level. In 2nd Generation mechanized and motorized companies, there are only ten vehicles, all of them APCs or IFVs: one command vehicle and three squad vehicles in each of three platoons. The 3rd Generation mechanized company adds a supply section, an anti-tank squad, a grenade-launcher platoon, and a mortar platoon. In the Gen 2 organization, these assets were concentrated at the battalion level and attached downward as needed; by comparison, the Gen 3 organization gives Company leaders greater autonomy, and by extension helps the company cover a broader front.