Chapter 57: 056 Academic Goals

Work and training for the pair began immediately after they woke up.

Administrative tasks, such as registering for their classes in the academy and the records of what materials they were receiving could be handled to some degree by the related Grand Elder or one of their subordinates, but there was a mighty sum of small details and specifics that required their attention.

Diana was quite horrified to find out that her classes were not segmented throughout the day on a schedule. Instead, she was going to be expected to arrive at the classroom or other such meeting place at an early time and spend her entire day there. It might be efficient, it might be effective, but she did not want to be spending 12 hours a day doing busy work.

Donovan, on the other hand, was completely unsurprised by the arrangements for him. There were peculiarities, sure, but the revelation that he would be spending almost all of his time in something resembling a barrack was well within expectations. It was such a basic expectation he was almost disappointed there wasn't a catch. The thing was that normally, there would be.

There was a factor neither had taken into account.

The vast majority of the students in attendance were nobles, the vast majority of which didn't take their education too seriously.

Diana might be spending an entire day in class, but the Scholar guaranteed her that it would not be anywhere near the intensity she was used to. Her workload was an oddity, deciding to dedicate five days in a week to classes where most others would only loaf around for one or two. She was time and time again assured that there would be no extracurricular work to do outside of the occasional project, and there wouldn't be much work to do in class either.

Diana still wasn't used to a reality where nearly everyone was incapable of reading and writing. This made note-taking an impossibility for most, so their educational apparatus had to adapt to accommodate. There were not going to be any written tests, no assessments, no strict criteria for passing or failing. Flunking a class, it would seem, was next to impossible so long as one tried just a little bit. The vows of neutrality the staff were required to take barred them from denying someone from progressing if they could not prove they did not put in effort.

This was something that Donovan and Diana alike considered to be ridiculous.

Donovan was not so lucky. While he wouldn't exactly be kicked from the military academy if he repeatedly failed, he would not be able to progress up the 'ranks' if he did not succeed. This academy was quite a bit more competitive as well, though the average amount of days an individual would spend 'in class' over the course of a week was only three. Donovan was planning to attend these trainings all seven days, only stopping when he determined he needed to or if there were other plans.

As a special consideration, Donovan would be placed at the lowest officer level available, at the head of a squad. It would have five members including himself, and the selection would be left up to the Marshall. His squire, or whoever would be chosen for a similar position at his side, would be part of this squad in accordance with tradition.

Because of his unique situation of his squad being created after the first round of competitions and all of the 'armies' having already been formed, his squad would be considered independent. Attaching it to any existing army would be considered unfair for all parties involved. Therefore, Donovan would not have to answer to a higher commanding officer, but he would not be able to take part in competitions where units larger than a squad were being assessed.

His unit would remain that way until the next year, or until a squad from one of the armies disbanded and needed to be replaced. Additionally, such a change would be made only with both parties' consent.

Donovan and Diana alike considered this arrangement to be quite fitting. There were disadvantages to be sure, fewer opportunities to show his worth and being isolated from how armies were usually operated being among them, but the opportunities provided by it were deemed to make up for it.

The biggest was that it would give Donovan experience in working with people on a smaller, manageable level. Members could be added to his squad up to a maximum of ten, but he needed to learn how to work with people on the ground first. Most of his 'experience' was theoretical at the moment, and almost all of it presumed the use of modern weaponry and communications systems to work with. Before he could even think about commanding a force that required him issue orders that needed to be relayed through lower ranking officers, he needed to command a unit at this level.

Aside from that, the biggest concern of Donovan's was getting used to melee combat. As it stood, he was still not very good at sword fighting. Training was making him better, but he wasn't at the level that the Captain wanted him to be.

On the other hand, Diana's biggest concern was with having him accrue accolades. She was intimately familiar with politics, at least she felt she was. She argued that, should he be placed into a greater command structure before he was ready, he would be unable to prove himself worthy of being put into positions where he could stand out. Being independent might make him seem incompetent for a period of time, something that was definitely undesirable, but as he improved he would attract positive attention as someone who could be trusted to perform daring operations. Risky moves in combat that would no doubt bring him glory. Glory that would lead to promotions. Promotions that would lead to prominence.

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So long as Donovan could actually get to the point where he won more than he lost, which nobody involved doubted he could do, he would be able to progress towards their end goal for his stay in the military academy. Donovan had five years to get to the level of General of one of the armies.

There were five primary ranks of command above the standard soldier.

Don was currently the lowest of these, squad leader. Squads usually consisted of around five to ten soldiers under the command of a single person. The next level up, the Regimental Officer, was similarly in command of a regiment. These consisted of anywhere between 50 to 100 soldiers, with a five to ten squads being standard.

The Brigadier was next, being in command of a brigade. Containing three to five regiments, it traditionally sported a fighting strength of anywhere between 250 to 500 men. This is the point where Donovan estimated problems to arise in the command process, and he determined he would need training in the field to learn beyond this point.

Above that lay the Division Commander, naturally commanding a Division. They tended to be four or five brigades strong with a handful other smaller units acting as independent support. They usually tried to keep their strength between one and three thousand men in order to not be too difficult to manage. From what Donovan could tell from the information the Marshall gave him, Divisions were given a level of freedom bordering on the independent in the Sanctum's military academy. This supposedly owed more to the fact that there was conflict between the children of higher ranking aristocrats that rose to that level through collaboration with their fellow noblemen. In order to allow them the opportunity to prove themselves worthy to their parents and contend for the title of General, small amounts of insubordination were tolerated.

The ones who unfortunately had to tolerate these actions were the Generals, the leaders of armies. In the Academy, they represented the largest military unit, though in he grand militaries of some larger nations there existed a grouping more powerful. In the interests of fairness, armies in the Sanctum were expected to maintain a number of troops as close to ten thousand as possible. In practice, this meant they often had either seven or eight divisions, though as few as five larger divisions or as many as ten smaller divisions were not all too uncommon either. Fewer division meant that a general would have less flexibility, but far more power in a one on one confrontation whilst having more divisions would give them more deployment options.

Divisions, it would seem, had a tendency to be spread out, rarely ever grouping together. In the scenarios set forth in competitions, this often meant that each division would be sent to accomplish a different objective, be it sieging a castle, holding a bridge, or assaulting a city. If they ran into another division, they would often have to engage in combat alone, so the individual combat prowess of a division could not be factored out of a general's decisions of who to send where.

In this way, it could clearly be seen that while more divisions meant you might accomplish your objectives faster as you could accomplish several different tasks at the same time, if any of them came into conflict with an opponent's fewer in number but larger in size divisions they were likely to lose.

Donovan was not confident in his ability to judge this sort of thing. In the modern conflicts he was used to learning about, wars were fought on fronts, large swaths of land that traced the border of opposing sides and fought with armies that quite simply dwarfed the numbers presented to him here. In fact, what they considered an army (of which ten thousand was considered to be a fairly large size) barely even qualified as a division if he was to go by the standards of the last terrestrial conflict between larger powers on Earth.

Donovan would say that his knowledge lay not in the commanding of a few large engagements, but maintaining a vast frontline of which combat strategy was a small part of. He understood how to position and move around units at pretty much every level, but that knowledge once again really only applied to modern weaponry and tactics. As much as he would like to say that a soldier mounted on a horse was the equivalent to a tank or other such armored vehicle, he couldn't, and the reason was nothing other than range.

The fact of the matter is that engagements between armed forces with precise, long range, and potentially even guided weapons mounted on armored chassis' that could move faster than any animal could run and those between factions fighting with what amounted to little more than glorified sharpened sticks could reasonably be compared to the differences between life lived on the ground and life lived underwater. The way you had to move was different, what you needed to target in order to achieve victory was different, even the way you considered weather was different.

Air power was another facet he needed to consider, or rather the lack thereof was something that occupied his thoughts. Don was keenly aware of the advantages of air superiority, so much so that he wasn't sure how he should approach a situation where aerial reconnaissance wasn't even a thought that entered most commander's brains. They couldn't fly, so why should they even try?

Don needed to get a taste of combat, especially a taste of combat under someone else's command, so that he could get an idea of what they were considering when they made their moves. Hopefully, he would be able to find someone halfway competent to learn under, he had heard that not all of the Generals were good at their jobs.

However, before Don cold get to work on anything related to combat or leading, he had to actually be able to communicate his orders and intentions to those beneath him. Being a commander would be little use to him if no one could understand what he was saying.

And the only way they could understand what he was saying was if he learned how to speak as they did, he had to learn to use split.

These were some lessons that were not as easy as he would have hoped.

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