"Wooo~~~"
The horns calling men to arms sounded. Great Han's warriors began feeding their horses and honing their weapons, while government officials began consulting household registers and submitting the names of able-bodied men in the commanderies and kingdoms fit to campaign.
The greatest difference between ancient dynasties and modern societies in military affairs was that the former did not maintain enormous standing armies.
For ancient dynasties with low productivity, the cost of doing so was simply too high. They could not afford it.
Chang'an nominally had over twenty thousand Imperial Guards, almost thirty thousand, but in reality, apart from the period when the Southern and Northern Armies were at their greatest strength, the number generally remained around fifteen thousand. A Two-Thousand-Shi Commandant was already a very high-ranking official, yet the number of troops he actually commanded was extremely small. The remaining Imperial Guards were distributed among the commanderies of Guanzhong on rotation.
The same held true across the vast commanderies of Shandong. Each commandery or kingdom generally had several hundred to around a thousand Commandery Troops, allocated according to its size. These constituted Great Han's standing army, and even these alone incurred enormous expenses.
When the Han Court went to war, it always began with several thousand or over ten thousand men, then used these elite troops as a framework, continually recruiting along the route to fill out the ranks until it had an army of tens or even hundreds of thousands. Those conscripted soldiers had also undergone training and possessed considerable military proficiency. Such an army's fighting strength far surpassed that of armies composed of criminals and convicts, let alone armies of peasants who could not even get enough to eat.
Zhou Yafu had served as Great General for over twenty years and knew the Han Army all too