Army Officer Training School (Themiclesia)
The Army Officer Training School (陸軍官佐訓練校) of Themiclesia is the facility that trains most non-commissioned officers (NCO, 佐官) in the Themiclesian Army. It should not be confounded with the Army Academy, which produces commissioned officers (官).
History
Prior to the Pan-Septentrion War, there was no specialized training facility for NCOs.
Candidates for some NCO positions generally studied alongside those for commissioned positions, except the enrolment and graduation criteria of the former were less demanding and generally required the completion of fewer academic courses. The task of teaching NCOs was often done by retired NCOs in conjunction with junior faculty from the Academy. Typically, an NCO can take as little as one or two years of training to enter service, while a commissioned officer would normally take six. This training system is considerably different from the practice of any Casaterran state and produced NCOs that were more similar to commissioned officers. These NCOs were more typically found in command positions, such as that of a platoon. Such NCOs were often looked upon by commissioned officers as "half a commissioned officer" and one of their kind. Other NCOs were produced in training facilities where enlisted men were acquainted with their tasks and routines. There were dedicated training courses for NCO candidates, who were most often soldiers who have served several years and desired to take on more responsibility. Such NCOs were not initially titled "NCO" (佐官, "assistant officer") but called Leading Officers (首領), who are one class inferior to normal NCOs. This distinction stems from the traditional classification of the Themiclesian civil service.
The government introduced conscription in 1936 after the total breakdown of diplomatic channels of communication with the Greater Menghean Empire to prevent the escalation of the war in Dzhungestan. The Army leadership was profoundly unprepared for conscription (which was handled by the civil service), and within the year it received over 400,000 enlisted men, with no reserve officers, commissioned or otherwise, to lead them. The Army Officer Training School was created by ordinance the same year to produce "basically-competent" officers and NCOs in the shortest possible time to create units out of the massive number of recruits, who were then being trained. As the AOTS was not a chartered university granting degrees, its graduates were not eligible to receive commissions as such; instead, the Army granted them "acting commissions", which would be upgraded to a full commission if they later completed required studies in the Army Academy. This almost never happened, and the distinction between "officer" and "acting officer" eventually eroded away towards the end of the war, when even AOTS-produced officers had enough experience to contest some judgments produced by Academy-trained ones.
After the war and the demobilization of conscripted units, the Army attempted to resurrect its pre-war officer training routines as much as possible, but it soon became apparent that existing scheme produced too few officers to fill a reserve, should conscription ever occur again. The experience in the AOTS was heavily co-operated into the reforms at the Army Academy in the early 1950s, when the Academic Government dropped the more restrictive pre-requisites to entrance and ceased to require a dissertation and its defence for graduation, directly enabling the creation of a reserve officer corps. Part of this may be regarded in parallel to the liberalization of Themiclesian society and the gradual dissociation of academic accomplishment with officialdom. The AOTS survives today as an institution dedicated to the training of NCOs.
Locations
The AOTS has several training centres (the term "campus" is avoided in translation).