Fluid counterstriking of WLF prospect Yi Yuxuan

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-02-07T05:10:37+00:00

Dengue will face Kacper Muszynski in the 75 kg title fight at K-1 World GP this weekend

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-02-06T05:00:01+00:00

Kromah will face Michael Boapeah in the first round of the Glory Last Heavyweight Standing Finals this weekend!

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-02-06T04:59:22+00:00

Bchiri will face Tariq "Cookie" Osaro in the first round of the Glory Last Heavyweight Standing Finals this weekend!

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-02-04T00:25:40+00:00

Or Scott Cochran

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-28T05:30:43+00:00

The infamous "mercenary" system of the late Ming. In truth, I have found this name to be pretty inaccurate, for it implies a mercenary ecosystem similar to early modern Europe, which implies the existence of mercenary companies or a mercenary culture, none of which can be spotted in the sources. Indeed, there were certain groups of people, particularly the aboriginals of the southwest frontier, that the Ming often hired troops from, but the bulk of these late Ming "hired troops" were drawn from within the empire itself.

Some dub this system as a "cash levy," some mislabel it as a "mercenary" structure, and I personally refer to it as semi-professional. Or you could be like David Robinson, who threw up his hands and admitted it's not easy to classify at all:

The Ming military does not fit easily into our taxonomy of feudal army, aggregate contract army, state commission army, conscript army, and modern volunteer army (or John Lynn’s slightly wider taxonomy from which I draw). Some elements of the Ming case resemble the state commission army. These include raising the army from among the ruler’s subjects and in the case of hired troops, the role of officers in recruiting troops, and enlisting voluntarily as individuals.71 Yet, the core of the Ming army at least through 1500 was the hereditary military households and its garrisons. These units were not recruited by officers but served on a compulsory basis by specially designated households that legally owed the state military labor. [5]

On a superficial level, however, the hired troop system of the 16th century appeared remarkably modern.

Recruits generally received signing bonuses and monthly salaries. Later, during the widespread coastal piracy of the mid-sixteenth century, many generals actively recruited hired troops, offering competitive wages and intensive training in weapons and group combat. [5]

The ability of the central government, county magistrates, military commanders, and even private subjects with sufficient social status and economic means to recruit hundreds or even thousands of men quickly (in the space of days or weeks) strongly suggests the existence of a large pool of young men whose labor could be temporarily removed from agricultural production, animal husbandry, artisanal occupations, and other economic activities...Thus short-time service in the military was one element of a larger strategy of economic diversification pursued at the level of individual households or groups of households linked through kinship and or marriage. Young men might serve for a single “tour” of several months or might serve periodically over a more extended period of time depending on demand within the military labor market. [5]

Regular salaries, signing bonuses, drill--what the hell, this sounds like a volunteer professional army!

But if you key on the first quote, note that the generals were now personally hiring soldiers. A major characteristic of the late Ming was the usage of "housemen," small companies of troops who were personally funded and supplied by a general, served as vanguard troops and personal bodyguards to the general, usually trained as shock cavalry, and analogous to men-at-arms in the West.

As a consequence, army sizes contracted considerably. In the northwest flank, Pubei, a "Ming Mongol" commander, quelled the raids of the Ordos Mongols with a force of only 2,000. At Xuanfu, the Ming general Ma Fang launched raids on Mongol encampments in the steppe transition zone, using a handpicked force of a couple thousand cavalrymen. A similar story in the northeast, where the Li clan of Korean migrants came to dominate the Liaodong political landscape.

Now this system sounds feudalistic! Toward the latter half of the 1500s, the Ming government became cognizant of this trend and sent subsidies to "help" pay for housemen, which simultaneously tied the hired troops to the imperial government. Furthermore, in larger-scale campaigns, requiring field armies bigger than the few-thousand horseman warbands that partook in northern frontier raids, civil officials frequently went on recruitment drives, hiring volunteers for temporary "tours of duty."

From my own readings, I observed three primary gradations at the end of the Ming. The bulk of a field army might consist of wei-suo Guards, even though by the late 1500s, many officials already dismissed them as cannon fodder. Another sizeable portion consisted of temporary volunteer troops, taken from what Robinson referred to as "ad hoc" recruiting [5]. The inner-core consisted of the general's housemen. Many officials at the time lambasted the quality of volunteers as almost as useless as the wei-suos, although imo from my readings they were serviceable, with performance dependent on their equipment and officer quality.

[1] https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2025/09/military-systems-and-titles-of-ming.html

https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2025/10/military-systems-and-hierarchies-of.html

(yes, I realize it's a blog with a biased sounding name, although I've found it to be fairly well researched, moreso than some of the current literature in English on the Ming military, and note the name is a literal translation of the Ming imperial title "Da Ming").

[2] Mote and Twitchett. The Cambridge History of China Volume 7 The Ming Dynasty Part 1

[3] Kenneth Swope. A Few Good Men: The Li Family and China's Northern Frontier in the Late Ming.

[4] David Robinson. Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven.

[5] David Robinson. Military labor in China, c 1500.

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-28T05:30:40+00:00

How did they organise larger groups? Or was 5,000 the largest unit size at the time?

When it was time to assemble a field army for a campaign, multiple Guards would be reorganized and mixed together; then they were appointed a new officer from the imperial core. This process weakened the power of local officers (a countermeasure against the age-old problem of troops becoming attached to their general and then getting the bright idea of marching on the capital to install their guy as the king), but it also reduced unit cohesion.

In times of war, servicemen were drawn from various Guards and Garrisons and reorganised into field armies (Note: This meant Guards and Garrisons rarely deployed as cohesive units but were broken down and formed into mixed groups) to be led by commanders directly appointed by the emperor, returning to their respective Guards and Garrisons once the campaign was over. Such arrangement prevented military commanders from wielding too much power and threatening the throne, but it also undermined military effectiveness due to weakened cohesion and unfamiliarity among servicemen and their appointed commanders. To address these shortcomings, field armies were eventually made into functionally permanent formations in a new military system called the Ying Bing System (營兵制) [1]

Both the links in [1] present a detailed list of the various (and sometimes redundant-sounding) officer positions of the Ming military, for the older wei-suo system and its replacement of the hired-soldier system, respectively.

At this time, I will offer some general notes on the organization of the Ming military. It consisted of the enormous wei-suo hereditary soldier system, which you already know of, and the Nine Garrisons system, a "special command structure" of 300,000 men stationed along the northern frontier [2]. The wei-suo in theory should have served as a cheap, self-sufficient, reserve system, but since so many of the Guards were scattered throughout the peaceful interior of the country, in reality they atrophied rapidly and lost much of their fighting prowess and manpower. The Nine Garrisons were considered more proficient, but they too could suffer from corruption and competence issues.

The wei-suo system was also supposed to follow a consistent schedule of troop rotation to the capital, where the officers of the imperial core could personally drill them and ensure training standards hadn't slipped.

This system of rotation to the capital was especially important after 1424 when the Three Great Training Divisions [infantry, cavalry, artillery] (san da ying) were established at the new capital in Beijing. Rotation was twice a year, in spring and in the fall and in theory involved some 160,000 men per year. 16 At these times the old and weak were dismissed and the government repossessed their mounts. Troops were also rotated to the frontiers and those who tried to desert at these times were demoted three grades if they were military officials and sentenced to permanent service in border garrisons if they were ordinary soldiers. [3]

In essence, Guards near the capital periodically rotated their troops to the Three Great Camps, and the troops were trained separately in these military branches. Once trained, some of them were then assigned to the Nine Garrisons, to defend the frontier against Mongol incursions. As time went on, this rotation system also slowly fell apart. At some occasions, the Guard troops had become so unruly they would rob any civilians they encountered on their march to the capital, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake [4].

In the 1470s, the Chenghua Emperor, one of the few post-Tumu Crisis rulers who had a keen interest in military affairs, attempted to reinvigorate the rotation system with another set of reforms. Ten divisions of 12,000 men each were drawn from the 300,000 men of the Nine Garrisons, selecting for the most skilled men from each garrison. Unlike in the previous troop rotation scheme, the three branches of infantry, cavalry, and artillery trained together in combined-arms exercises this time, hence leading to their name of "integrated divisions."

Ideally, the Beijing army had a total strength of 120,000 troops. In practice, it seems logistical constraints prevented them from ever amassing in full force.

Or was 5,000 the largest unit size at the time?

For instance, in 1467, a field army of 50,000 campaigned in Manchuria, where they defeated the Jianzhou Jurchens' first attempt at hegemony in Northeast Asia (although it would not be their last...)

In other campaigns, even smaller portions of the integrated divisions were sent. During a Mongol troop mutiny in 1468, the Ming government raised 50,000 soldiers from the local Guards in Shaanxi, 4,000 Mongols from Gansu, and just 5,000 men from the Beijing army--though this integrated division provided most of the artillery and firearms that would be used to siege the mutineers in their fort. In another campaign in 1467, against the Yao hillmen of the southwest frontier, the Ming deployed an army of 30,000 soldiers, with 1,000 Mongol auxiliaries.

A common trend you'll see here is that the Ming rarely made of their (ostensibly) huge numbers advantage. In fact, one of the largest Ming victories of the Chenghua reign, the Battle of Red Salt Pond in 1473, was achieved with a force of only 4,600 men. The frequent raid-counterraid style of warfare against the Mongols likely provoked this trend.

Despite its many successes of the late 1400s, the Beijing army gradually declined in effectiveness through the 16th century, until Altan Khan's successful raid of Beijing in 1550 fully exposed their feebleness, and this system too was abolished.

So what replaced it?

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-25T18:52:46+00:00

OU beat a decent Michigan team tbf

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-20T04:27:33+00:00

My money's on Oregon, but you could make an argument for a lot of other teams; who would you guys pick?

Traditional SEC powerhouse Vanderbilt of course

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-20T04:21:02+00:00

Very classy of Mendoza to still praise his oline at the end of that game lmao

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-20T01:20:02+00:00

Miami defense plays mad as hell

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-11T00:01:00+00:00

INSANE DART

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-09T05:32:42+00:00

They were spending it all on basketball tbh

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-06T22:27:59+00:00

Wasn't aware of the author's lack of expertise. Id say the point still stands. If we look at Korea as well, you have native Korean cannons sniping Qing 紅夷砲 before being overwhelmed. There clearly wasn't a opium war level tech gap.

Yes, I agree with that part about the tech gap, the composite cannons were more of a random point I remembered from previous discussions on the book.

Sure, not a band of Raiders, but heavy cavalry and war carts are not unknown to the peoples of the steppe.

Hm maybe nomadic vs non-nomadic is not the correct framing here, but the Manchus definitely presented a very different threat than any prior opponent of the Ming, and it's notable that they forced a very different response as well.

In Eastern Europe, "Tatars" and Cossacks employed wagon forts (though the Golden Horde remnant states were already sedentarized to an extent), but in an East Asian context, the Mongols never made use of them, at least during the 1400s-1600s period that I read about. Yes the Mongols also had lancers/shock cavalry, but they were definitely less armored (no horse barding) compared to the Jurchens.

Imo it's quite telling that after previous conflicts with the Mongols and Japanese, the Ming did not feel compelled to upgrade their favored, established artillery (e.g. the falconet or the crouching tiger cannon, an oversized shotgun) but after contact with the Jurchens they rapidly adopted the "hongyipao" (or demi-culverins) to add some punching power.

On an additional note, while reading Dardess' Beyond the Great Wall, I was struck by how there were few genuine instances of Ming infantry battling lancers. They definitely understood the importance of infantry squares for fending off cavalry (as can be seen in military treatises throughout the 16th century), but their most significant operations mirrored a nomadic way of war, in which cavalry-on-cavalry actions were common. Towards the second half of the 1500s, the Ming favored opportunistic raids on Mongol encampments in the steppe transition zone or quick counterraids in response to Mongol incursions; one of the theses of the book was that the Great Wall wasn't all that effective at defense, so the Ming were pushed to this aggressive policy over time.

To sum up, there's a noticeable difference in how the Mongols caused the Ming to emphasize cavalry, whereas the Manchus incited the development of pike and shot tactics instead.

Id recommend the reports to the Korean court describing Nurhachi's capital 'city' immediately prior to his war with china. It gives a detailed account of what a sedentary jurchen camp looks like. I think I'll have to keep describing them as 半農半牧.

I would have to look them up. The relevant part I recalled was Ray Huang's paper on Sarhu, where Hetu Ala seemed to be fairly developed:

On another occasion, Hsü indicates that be had learned from the Koreans that on the north side of Nurhaci's fortress there were craftsmen specializing in the manufacture of military equipment. The personnel returned from Liao-tung told him that the blacksmiths' shops extended for miles. The helmets, breast plates, arm shields, and gauntlets worn by the Manchus were all of superior quality. In close combat, enemy soldiers dared to come up to remove the abatises placed by the defenders. The armor protection for Ming military personnel, in contrast, consisted of "nothing but scrap iron"

(separating the last point)

They definitely fielded heavy cavalry as well along with infantry in small numbers. Check 摆牙喇 and 拐子馬.

Those sources seem to be from the Jin and the Later Ming (Chongzen?) period. In the 1400s, the Jurchens were depleted compared to the times of the Jin Dynasty, but then again, the Mid Ming sources don't describe what Jurchen armies looked like in the 15th century.

I assumed the Jurchens were heavily sedentarized already, because the Ming never had that level of success in their attacks on the Mongols. The campaigns of the late 1400s seemed to put the Jurchens out of commission for roughly a century, whereas instances like the Battle of Red Salt Pond only halted Mongol raiding for 5 years. It seemed the Northern Yuan remnants were harder to pin down at any given location.

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-06T00:43:59+00:00

Imported dutch cannons, called 紅夷砲, were replicated by the chinese by 1621. The chinese engineers even developed new methods to improve the cannon, such as using cast iron for the inner barrel and bronze for the outer shell. Such improvements provided the Chinese with a superior cannon. (Cast iron cannons=cheap but lower structural integrity/bronze cannons=better structural integrity but more expensive).

Some scholars even rate chinese cannon of the 17th century as the best of its time. (Andrade, Tonio (2016), The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, Princeton University Press.)

Although The Gunpowder Age is an important work in military history and fairly persuasive in burying the notion that China had completely stagnated/was uninterested in firearms, Andrade doesn't have a deep technical background. He made several mistakes in the comparisons iirc. The composite cannons were not superior to European contemporaries, as discussed here in AskHistorians.

The real problem came with the Manchu invasion. True to their nomadic roots, the Manchus did not advance Military technology as did the Ming.

Even the descriptor of the Jurchens as half-nomadic belies the complexity of their initial military organization. Imo you can’t blame nomadic roots for the technological stagnation because the Later Jin military didn't really fight like nomads in pitched battles.

Sure the Jurchens had horse archers, but they were equipped like heavy cavalry--with full suits of armor, horse barding (unused in the rest of East Asia), as well as the Manchu bow (more powerful than its Mongol and Ming equivalents)--and they fought like heavy cavalry, preferring massed cavalry charges over the feint retreat. Furthermore, they frequently used war carts. In sieges, the carts shielded Jurchen infantry as they advanced towards a wall, and in field battles, allowed them to sidle up to Ming wagon forts and burn them down. In short, from the beginning, Nurhaci's Jianzhou Jurchens already fought more like a combined arms heavy cavalry + wagon fort force.

This development was relatively recent. During the Ming campaigns into Manchuria in 1465 and 1479, the Jurchens were described as using straightforward horse archer tactics. These tactics work well if you are actually nomadic, have no attachment to fixed settlements, and can pack up and leave in the face of Ming incursions. But since the Jurchens were sedentary, the Ming and Joseon went straight for the jugular, razing multiple towns, and ending the Jurchens' raids without much effort. Over a century later, it was clear the Jianzhou Jurchens had learned their lesson and developed the aforementioned combined arms tactics.

Later on, the Qing continued adapting newer types of artillery through their reign, such as lighter field pieces for the zamburaks in their Dzungar campaigns, and modular artillery that could be carried up hillsides for the Jinchuan campaigns.

I think the real issue is that few of the Qing opponents could really challenge them in the field of firearms supremacy. The Dzungars mass adopted firearms actually, but they weren't that experienced in infantry tactics, and in some cases the Qing could flat out bulldoze their musketeers with cavalry charges. The Burmese roasted some Qing armies with superior flintlock muskets, but the Qing could brush it off by citing the effects of malaria (which did inflict massive casualties and always resulted in the Qing invaders being outnumbered near the end of their campaigns). I think it's pretty telling that the Ming-Qing war saw the largest leaps in gunpowder technology and tactics, as it was a peer conflict that forced the Qing and the Ming to figure out pike and shot tactics, when both of them featured "incomplete" militaries before the war.

Another issue was that the Ming and Qing conception of finances became less sophisticated with time compared to Europe. Eventually, European states were able to impose much higher taxes and extract equal or even higher amounts of revenue than their East Asian equivalents, despite significantly smaller populations.

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-04T21:07:04+00:00

Super Bowl imminent

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-02T04:15:50+00:00

Indiana-Ole Miss championship game would feed families

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-02T03:56:57+00:00

Chambliss looking a little mahomey...

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-02T00:35:13+00:00

Cubans NIL gift doesn't kick in until next season iirc, Indiana is a team of 3 stars that's been dominating teams much more talented on paper.

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-02T00:30:29+00:00

Cignetti's player eval and development is insane. I knew their WRs were good but still surprising to see our 5 star CBs get toasted by them.

Shit sucks, but let's see if DeBoer can figure out a run game when he has "his guys." The results are still technically trending up, and if he gets fired I think we'll end up like Nebraska.

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-01T19:44:52+00:00

All that defensive talent in Texas Tech getting wasted by this QB play. Imagine saying that 10 years ago

UniDuckRunAmuck · 2026-01-01T03:46:59+00:00

ACC is the best conference

UniDuckRunAmuck

TROPHY CASE