(At this point a person enters the room with a memorandum from the Duchess, presently elsewhere, that she thinks the Armed Forces committee should also contemplate the Hellknight orders, which have some of the best disciplined soldiers in Cheliax but as part of an institutional structure that is exceptionally evil and almost certainly beyond reform; she can speak privately with the chair after the session if he doesn't infer the rest of her thinking from there, but he probably will.)

Wow, they really pissed her off. He'll need to get to that, probably tomorrow.

The Archduke's a noble, too, even if he's new to being an Archduke, and Sarria has a response to the soldier. "Takes a hundred years of hanging the cowards to breed a good captain. One lucky man's not enough to bet on his kids being solid."

"Lastwall has many captains of humble birth. I suspect training matters far more than breeding, in this matter."

"I never noticed a particular quality difference by background myself... or, no, a specifically Menadorian noble officer will know how to kill things, but it's anybody's guess if he can do it in formation."

"Maybe you're right in Lastwall, Marshal, and maybe it's just that the nobles get set straight by their parents and the moneylenders don't. But in the south, all the merchants' sons are rotten."

"Perhaps you ought to consider the farmers' sons as well - It will likely prove impossible to import Lastwall's culture wholesale to Cheliax. But finding quality officers seems to be a matter of culture and training, not blood, so I doubt a policy aimed at finding officers of better blood will achieve much."

"As you say, sir."

"Can you say more about what from Lastwall will and won't be portable, sir?"

All of everyone's sons are rotten. Which now that she says it like that, it's obvious that this is just something he's saying so he or an ally of his can ensure their kids inherit all the best positions, not something he believes. She was an idiot for not realizing it sooner. Which then implies that the paladin doesn't have allies in the nobility, but he does have a support base among the common soldiers he wants to empower. Is he worth backing, then? She's pretty sure he's one of the worst of the lot himself - you don't get everyone praising you like he does without having a lot of skeletons you need to invest the effort into keeping buried - but she already knew that, and it doesn't mean is proposal is definitely the wrong one just because he said it. Even incompetent officers sometimes want mildly competent subordinates to steal credit from, and expecting to get more than mildly competent out of the army is a fool's errand.

Iker gives Blai an actually genuine smile at his compliment to Menador. Hell yea we can kill things!

The Lastwaller probably had the right of it - he'd led an actual victorious army, after all.

Besides, if the Tosel clan were anything to go from, old military blood couldn't stop men from playing the old Asmodean games, at least until their armies were destroyed and their bodies statues.

"Some things that we hopefully can copy from Lastwall are things like officer training, standards for discipline, the concept of an unlawful order - Things which I don't expect we could easily copy here are - in Lastwall every man is conscripted for three years. I think that would be extremely difficult in a country of Cheliax' size, and a lot of the other things that Lastwall does rely on it. Training standards for ordinary professional or levied soldiers take into account this existing experience. Perhaps the conscript training and the volunteer training on their own would suffice to produce soldiers of the same quality and virtue as those in Lastwall, but I doubt it - I think the three years of real experience on the border does something. And without that quality, it might be harder to draw capable officers from the ranks. Many of the best officers I've known were drawn from yeoman volunteers, and I find Cheliax lacking in yeomen... Perhaps other committees will change that, but the culture will take some time to adjust to that. The fact that Lastwall does not have a king, merely a governing council, and that the officers and soldiers are sworn to the faith and the cause rather than any individual helps with discipline and morale, I think, but cannot be straightforwardly imported here."

Blai writes this all down very attentively. "It seems at least possible that the Queen isn't attached to having the army sworn to her person."

She most certainly is. "I appreciate your advice, Marshal. What, though, would you say are the flaws you have noticed in the Chelish army, leading forces against it on campaign?" 

"The war was over fast; it wasn't much of a campaign. From my limited experience actually fighting the Chelish army - Poor coordination across levels. The army I captured lost a tenth of its men to their own side when they set the river aflame. Their generals didn't know it was coming. They got orders to march their army to Detmer, and they did - no explanation of why. We assume they were supposed to take transport to Xer for an invasion of Galt, but again, the generals didn't know. They were ordered to make Detmer in four days, and might have made it in eight, if we let them, but they surrendered with barely a fight after two and the war was, rather famously, over in four. Poor morale, of course, as you might infer from that quick surrender. A great deal of trouble dealing with skirmishers, though that's only a secondhand report and I have no personal insight into the tactical follies that led to that."

Iker hasn't not noticed the talk of the army breaking off from the queen, but he's going to pretend he didn't. They're not even hiding how many people they have on the sidelines listening in. That's an easy mode loyalty test. Even the paladin is smart enough to ignore it and move on, talk about how bad we lost the last war.

"Two days, and that was with the clerics and devils ready to stab them in the back for running..."

"Two days, which started with them being decimated by their own side, followed by a forced march while harassed by veteran rangers, and frequent night attacks so I doubt they got much rest - Also I think the devils weren't there. Teleported off to some other front in the war, I imagine. The left flank broke, the clerics couldn't stop it, and then their commander killed his Asmodean supervisor and put up a white flag."

"I think it's a very useful observation that any general who you don't trust without an Asmodean observer you can't trust with one, and that the discovery of this rule significantly aided the dissolution of the Chelish military system."

"Sounds like a coward of a general, breaks when the threat in front of him is scarier than the one standing behind him."

Iker suddenly gets the actual point being made. It takes a moment.

"Or sounds like we need a reason to fight instead of running, better than not wanting to get tortured and killed once you get back home."

Good for him!

"Exactly. Now, we've covered a good deal today, but there's one more thing I want to say before we move on." 

He looks at Blai. "I believe you had a concern to raise with the cold-weather uniforms?"

"- yes, if it's at the right level of granularity, though I had supposed it wasn't."

"Best to get it written down now even if this isn't the right place to submit it, we've got time."

"The uniform code requires pants to be tucked in to the boot. This has some virtues but allows sufficiently deep snow to get into the boots and melt there. People who allowed their soldiers to wear the pant cuff outside of their boots saw reductions in this problem but greater wear and tear on the pants. I think the ideal solution would be something like an additional ring of cloth sewn to the end of the pant leg, so that the main part of the pant is worn inside the boot and the additional part, relatively quick to replace as Mending becomes ineffective, remains outside to keep snow out. The placket for the standard coat buttonhole is not thick enough, I think to enable the buttons to be sewn on more snugly; either some button looseness should be tolerated, or an additional flap be added over that area. Balaclavas were issued for a period of two years and then discontinued; I think they should have remained standard, at least for women who cannot grow beards as insulation."