The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) by M.K. Sangert Page B

of purposeful preparations for a much bigger offensive into Russian Turkestan.
    “In good conscience, I must agree w ith my colleague concerning the need for adequate provisions,” Supreme General Shirokuchi said, for the first time since the meeting began opening his mouth to speak. “But we should take the European situation into account as well. If our European allies fall, then there might be a grand conspiracy against our country by all sorts of impious devils that may see an opportunity to undermine our shining national destiny.”
    Shirokuchi had been promoted to command of the Operational Department after the end of the Altay Campaign when his predecessor was sent into honorable retirement to allow for fresh blood at the top of the Imperial Army. He was not one of the leaders of the ascendant so-called Prussian Faction, but he was very sympathetic to that part of the army establishment which had been spurred by the performance of armored forces in Anatolia more than a decade ago.
    As far as Sugahito knew, Supreme General Shirokuchi was probably part of the vast informal group of officers that were sympathetic to the Prussian Faction and could claim credit for at least strengthening their voice in the Emperor’s presence before the war by discrediting their detractors even though he was not any kind of actual “Prussian” theorist. The doctrinal war had certainly gone completely against the “Traditionalists” after the debacle in Turkestan and the later Russian incursion into northern Shinkyou. The fact that both of the Emperor’s senior personal advisers were from the Prussian anti-Traditionalist Faction hardly hurt that camp’s insistence on mechanized war rather than the “decisive battle” doctrinaires who had been influential for most of the past century that had emerged from the military theorists in the previous years who had worked on developing preexisting notions of warfare rather than to look for a brand new way of thinking the way the Prussian Faction had joined in the revolutionary military thinking of German, British, and French theorists.
    “The operation which the General Staff has devised cannot be implemented that far ahead of schedule,” said the old supreme general. “However, I suggest that the General Staff is permitted to consider a revision so that we can begin certain advances ahead of plan.”
    The conversation was not particularly tense when the officials from the different military and civilian bodies reported on the current state of their areas of responsibility. The departments and organizations represented at the Supreme War Council had a range of topics to mention to each other and the sovereign, ranging from agricultural output to social cohesion to military strategy, all coming together as central to the war effort and important to be familiar with in a total war like this where every resource might be required for victory.
    The Supreme War Council and the liaising between civil and military bureaucracies had been both theoretically and practically laid down even during the bloody Holy Liberation War against the evil Qing Dynasty more than a century ago when the first outline of the Total Imperial Society Theory had begun to form in the minds of scholars. The Central Military Cabal which had later become the Imperial General Staff had been born in the fires of that war, and with it what legalist scholars had labelled the Theory of Hierarchical Military Social Order, the family of theories of military supremacy over all facets of social life, political decision-making, and military might. The scholars had combined traditional legalist thinking with European post-Napoleonic ideas and ideas derived from the momentous war against the Qing—as well as the vital Kaei Restoration and the abolition of Magnate Rule—to promote the ideal of a perfect social pyramid of political organization in which all legitimate power was perfectly aligned with the Chrysanthemum Throne down to