Chapter 34
What is the South Army’s greatest weakness?
If someone asked me that, I would answer without hesitation:
'Numbers.'
An army is never a productive organization.
It consumes more money than any other group, and there’s no way to recoup it.
It’s not like in the Republic of Korea from my previous life, where we could export defense products. If we sold weapons here, those weapons would eventually be pointed at our own soldiers, and there was no way we’d do something that foolish.
So even after declaring a wartime system, we didn’t increase the size of the army much.
The reason was simple.
"After all, for the time being, there’s almost no chance we’ll clash on land."
It was because the Empire feared civil war.
Of course, the mages wanted to attack us somehow, but without the consent of the nobles and the corrupt imperial generals, they couldn’t casually start a war.
In the end, for a 'war' to exist at all, imperial troops and noble retainers were necessary.
That was why, at this point, an army of this size was enough to defend our territory.
The rest?
We had factories to run. Railroads to lay. We had to help modernize the West. Once we’d declared a wartime system and begun producing munitions, there was plenty to do.
The remaining personnel were also being assigned to munitions support rather than the army.
The South’s military needed vastly more supplies than the imperial army did.
Spears and swords can be used many times. But firearms and shells cannot.
You can’t recover a bullet once it’s been fired, and you can’t pick up an exploded shell and reuse it either.
That’s why, in the modern era, logistics are as precious to an army as life itself.
Even if it wasn’t on the scale of the U.S. military, where ten support personnel back every soldier, we at least had to make sure there was never a situation where we couldn’t fight because we ran out of bullets.
And so the number of regular Southern troops currently stood at 150,000.
For a region of ten million people undergoing an industrial revolution, that was a fairly small force.
That was also why I was staking my life on modernizing the Western army.
Because the 170,000-strong Western army on paper, along with the potential population that could be conscripted from the West, would be a huge help in the full-scale imperial civil war to come.
The Western army might do something stupid once it got machine guns?
Well, I doubted they’d suddenly lose their minds and turn on the allied Southern army while fighting their hereditary enemies, the barbarians.
Even if something like that did happen, suppressing them wouldn’t take very long.
The true firepower of a machine gun comes not from its overwhelming rate of fire, but from the supply lines that can keep up with it.
Until I could be sure the West was completely trustworthy, all munitions would be produced only in the Southern mainland, so that was fine.
"Have you gotten the agreement of all the Western nobles?"
"Yes. There were no lords who objected, Your Excellency."
"Good. Then have the General Staff draw up the barbarian subjugation plan. I’ll be taking part in the barbarian campaign as well, so make sure nothing is lacking in the preparations."
With that, the West was practically in the South’s hands.
Politics, economics, finance, manufacturing, the military—there wasn’t a single field that could function properly without Southern involvement now.
And that structure hadn’t even been forced on them by us; the Western side had built it of their own volition.
It was a sturdy structure that would not easily break. Once it was complete, all we had to do was keep moving forward as we were.
So before the barbarian subjugation began, there was a problem that needed to be dealt with first.
"It’s time we overhauled the navy as well."
The moment the West was annexed, the fragile peace we’d been enjoying would shatter at once.
Enemies who had been wavering until now would immediately raise spear and sword against me.
And right at the front of them would be Eastern Archduke Edward.
The option he’d choose, naturally, would be a naval blockade.
It would take at least several months to build warships capable of countering a naval blockade, so I started preparing for the next-generation sea force from now.
"This is the design proposal sent from the Design Bureau, Your Excellency."
[ Southern Special Design Bureau Submersible Vessel Design Proposal ]
[ project 11502 ]
As you can tell from the name, it was a submarine.
Since it bore the name of a Southern Special Design Bureau proposal, it was a design submitted directly by the bureau, not by me.
The reason I had specifically commissioned a submarine design from them was simple.
Surface ship construction and submarine construction were completely different fields, so I wanted to see just how much technological capability the Design Bureau could actually implement.
The result was quite surprising.
"Oh, not bad."
The blueprints I received resembled an early submarine from the 19th century.
The Nordenfelt No. 2, launched by the Ottoman Empire in 1886.
It featured a streamlined hull that resembled a torpedo and a conning tower jutting out on top.
It was the result of advances in shipbuilding through dreadnought construction, along with steel mana-stone alloy manufacturing technology and mana engines.
"Come to think of it, a hundred years had passed since the Industrial Revolution began, and it would have been strange if military weapon technology had still been stuck at medieval levels."
The development of technology naturally leads to the development of weapons.
However, in this world, that was impossible.
Because the mage and knight classes were desperately blocking the progress of weaponry.
After Kaiser III, the mages had threatened Southern companies just as the Industrial Revolution was beginning, warning that if they produced weapons, they would never buy their goods.
So for the past hundred years, companies had deliberately refrained from producing weapons. Companies always put profit first, after all.
But the companies hadn’t left me with nothing.
The Southern Special Design Bureau.
From weapons to civilian technologies, it was a place where all kinds of experimental technology that had gone unseen during more than a hundred years of industrialization had accumulated.
Although in the original 'Mona-jo' novel it was all burned away in the wave of collectivization, that wasn’t the case in this world.
Because I was here, and I could make very good use of that technology.
All the technologies accumulated in the Southern Special Design Bureau were of enormous help in bringing Earth’s blueprints to fruition in this world.
Besides, this world had one absurdly overpowered material that Earth in the 20th century didn’t have.
Mana stone.
A mysterious substance with several times the efficiency of fossil fuels at the same mass.
If you make steel and alloys with it, you get light yet strong armor; if you grind it into powder and mix it into gunpowder, its explosive power skyrockets; and because it can emit and detect mana, it can even substitute for limited semiconductor functions—a magical stone indeed.
Of course, can it completely replace petroleum? No, not quite.
You can’t exactly build a jet engine with solid mana stones right now. Nor can you ignore all the products made from petroleum byproducts, or asphalt.
But that was a story for a little later.
This was far too early for a world that hadn’t even grasped the concept of a jet engine yet.
For now, at this rate, we should be able to build something close to the submarine I had in mind.
The submarine that had been called the terror of the seas in the First and Second World Wars.
A pack of wolves beneath the sea.
***
Recently, the engineers of the Southern Special Design Bureau had all been busy.
It was because demand for new weapons had surged after the shift to total war.
"Hmm... The machine gun manufacturing process is too complicated. And the machine gun design has too many reliability issues. Let’s revise it once."
"There’s a report that the equipment used by the heavy infantry on the front lines is too burdensome in weight. See if you can reduce the weight as well."
"Oh? A submachine gun? This is a pretty good class of weapon too. Keep researching it."
"This is the Archduke’s order. Begin a conceptual design for a new 88mm dual-purpose gun to replace the current 76mm field guns and 76mm anti-aircraft guns used by the army."
With the wartime economy in place, the Design Bureau was flooded with overwhelming financial support.
It also made it possible to develop weapons that had never been attempted before. As many company factories converted to weapons production, countless opportunities opened up.
Countless design concepts that had been locked away in vaults for a hundred years under pressure from the mage class saw the light of day once more.
Naturally, for the engineers at the Design Bureau, it was nothing but a happy time.
"Ah, we’ll carry on the will of our seniors."
"Hah, this vault is finally opening."
"So now we don’t have to worry about those stuck-up mage bastards?"
Countless concepts and blueprints that had been secretly developed to evade the mages emerged one after another.
Among them was a concept for a submarine as well.
It was the trace left by senior engineers who had tried to conquer the sea with nothing but human strength.
The Design Bureau engineers, following Kyle’s orders, completed the blueprints by including everything that could theoretically be realized with existing technology.
[ Southern Special Design Bureau Submersible Vessel Design Proposal ]
[ project 11502 ]
"Ugh..."
"Senior, I think this is as far as I go..."
"I definitely drank coffee... so why am I sleepy..."
The essence of Southern technology, created by dozens of the best engineers working together. The submarine’s blueprints.
Although it was lacking in many ways, they weren’t worried.
Because if it was the Southern Archduke Kyle Leopold who had designed the dreadnought, he would find a way to solve the problems.
How would he solve problems that dozens of people working together couldn’t?
That didn’t matter to them.
Kyle Leopold would surely reinforce the weak points of the blueprints.
And Kyle Leopold did not betray the expectations of those Design Bureau engineers.
"This is the draft of the next-generation submarine that Your Excellency envisioned."
A few weeks later, one man from the Grand Duke’s Castle came to the Design Bureau carrying a sealed document.
"He called this vessel the UB-1."
U-boat.
The name of a small, stealthy hunter beneath the sea.