Kiravian Defence Executive
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The Defence Executive (Coscivian: Vekturora Defensul) is the Collegiate Executive responsible for the national defence policy of the Kiravian Federacy and the administration of the Kiravian Armed Forces and their related entities. It is headquartered at the Kartika Citadel in Arthodun, District of Ksoīnvra.
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 Side gate to the Arthodun Citadel complex | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | the Citadel Arthodun, District of Ksoīnvra |
| Motto | Ağra Dextum "Death to the Enemy" |
| Employees | Millions |
| Annual budget | £912.5 billion |
| Minister responsible |
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| Child agencies | |
| Website | wwww.defensuv.āri.kr |
History
The Defence Executive descends directly from the Secretariat for the Powers, one of the four original portfolio-delimited bureaucracies of the Kiravian Confederation alongside the Secretariats of State, the Sea, and the Land. Under this scheme, the Secretariat for the Powers was responsible for armies and warfare, but also for the exchequer and fiscus, the currency and mint, the salt tax, and "works and defences" including fortifications and highways. The Confederation did not have a standing army to speak of. Rather, relatively small formations of professional soldiers were maintained full time under the authority of individual states and at their expense; full-fledged armies were raised by each state when needed. The states were obligated to provide armies to the Confederation in wartime, which would serve under the command of grandees appointed by the Confederal Stanora. Nonetheless, the Secretariat for the Powers did need to make preparations for wartime, which it did by constructing fortifications - especially coastal fortifications -, overseeing gun foundries and powder works, amassing stockpiles of militarily important manufactures and materials, and paving roads. Confederal forts were not solely military installations; they usually also served as supply depots, postal nodes, prisons, revenue offices, and courthouses. Forts were manned by garrisons that were (ideally) large enough to secure them against bandits, angry mobs, and localised insurrections, but small enough so as to not appear to threaten the sovereign rights of the state in which they were situated. Soldiers assigned to inland garrisons were stationed away from their homes and often drawn from disparate locations and ethnic/caste backgrounds to prevent mutiny and coöption, presaging Kiravia's later approach to ethnic issues in the military. These garrisons, a Federal Guard that served an analogous protective function for the Confederal edifices in West Valēka, and a small roster of 'marshals' assisting the judiciary, constituted the entirety of the standing Confederal armed force on land.
The Confederal Navy fell under the purview of the Secretariat for the Sea (now the Maritime Executive), where it would remain until 1967 AD when it was transferred to the Defence Executive. Despite the transfer and an official agenda of deepening interservice integration in the 21st century, the legacy of separate and parallel administration of the Army and Navy is is still reflected in the contemporary Defence Executive to a significant extent.
A truly national army was first organised for fight the Continental War, and a standing army under permanent federal command would be established when the new federalist constitution was enacted after the war. In the Federal period, the Secretariat was transformed to reflect this reality. Shedding its fiscal and monetary policy functions and renamed the Secretariat of Arms, it was augmented with a much larger bureaucratic apparatus suited to the task of administering, arming, and supplying an high-early-modern army with an increasingly expeditionary mission profile. When the federal capital was moved to Kartika, the Secretariat based itself in the Arthodun Citadel where it remains today.
During the latter part of the 19th century, the Arms Executive began to acquire a reputation for ineptitude, inefficiency, and corruption that modern historians tend to believe was reasonably well-founded. The most talented young civil servants gravitated more toward other bureaux, particularly those concerned with commerce, industry, and the burgeoning colonial empire. Meanwhile, many desk jobs at the Arms Executive were filled by what future Prime Executive Partholón Térunbuir described as "the chaff and fat of the officer class", army officers of aristocratic or martial family backgrounds who had been dismissed from field positions or were constitutionally unfit for active service yet retained or obtained, respectively, their commissions, often through bribery, patronage, or familial connexions. Troops in the Colonies held the Kartika paper-pushers in very low regard, which they expressed in several cadences and drinking songs that have been passed down from that era. Concerns about waste, fraud, and abuse were raised numerous times by the Stanora but appear to have not been adequately addressed. Indeed, during the domestic unrest of the Colour Wars Kiravian leaders turned instead to the Territorial Executive to coördinate the effort to restore order (the section of the Territorial Executive so employed would later be spun off into the Security Executive).
Many historians believe that organisational dysfunction at the Arms Executive significantly hampered the performance of the Federalist military during the Kiravian Civil War and contributed to its eventual defeat, though this view has become less widely accepted since the 1990s.[1] The stress of the war exposed the preëxisting weaknesses in the bureaucracy prompting the administration to enact severe but belated reforms and the Army to rely on soldier-support groups and hydration committees from civil society to keep its troops in fighting condition. After the fall of Kartika the Arms Executive, like much of the civilian government, largely ceased to function and was replaced by provisional and irregular administrative structures fused with the military chain of command in the several pockets of mainland territory still held by the Federalists. This state of affairs persisted until the Federalists were fully expelled from Great Kirav.
Upon being elected Prime Executive by the Electoral College in exile on Æonara, Field Marshal Séan Kæśek renamed what remained of the organisation to the Defence Executive and proceeded to rebuild it more or less from the ground up, filling the senior positions with appointees hand-picked based on their effectiveness during the later stages of the war. The Defence Executive was central to the National Mission, as formulated by Kæśek and the Renaissance Party, of defending the Remnant territories and reconquering the Mainland, and was thus invested with a sense of urgency and purpose that it had perhaps lacked in previous times. In 1967, it assumed responsibility for the Navy from the Maritime Executive, bringing all branches of the Armed Forces under the same roof, so to speak, for the first time.
After Kiravian Reunification in AD 1985, the Defence Executive entered a state of flux as it struggled to absorb the bureaucratic machinery of the former KU Ministry of Defence and digest the personnel and matériel of the Kiravian People's Army. It also experienced much change due to the end of conscription and a total sea change in the Federacy's strategic position and outlook.
During the 2020s AD the Executive expanded under the hawkish policies of the Candrin administration, reaching a climax during the Final War of the Deluge which saw the Executive supply and administer the Armed Forces through their first full-scale war in nearly a century. Although the Kiravian forces were victorious, the enormous human and financial cost of the war, as well as the new geopolitical landscape resulting from it, brought calls for further reform. In 2026 AD the Ilkaśvar administration undertook comprehensive reforms to modernise the Armed Forces and their attendant bureaucracy. These reforms included the reorganisation of the Army Air Corps as a service branch in its own right, the Kiravian Airforce, which was removed from the Secretariat of the Army and placed under a new Secretariat of the Superiority Forces, which also took on responsibility for strategic weapons and space operations previously under the Army. The Territorial Defence Forces were organised under the Secretariat of the Army. In addition, the Veterans' Care Division was massively expanded to handle the largest troop demobilisation in Kiravian history.
Agencies
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Secretariat of the Army
Secretariat of the Fleet Secretariat of Superiority Forces |
Intelligence Division
Arsenal Division
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Boring but Important Division
Apex Division
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Veterans' Services Division
- Office of Benefits Administration
- Veteran Healthcare Agency
Provides subsidised healthcare to ex-servicemen. - Demobilisation Office
Assists veterans with reïntegration to civilian life. - Commission for Old Soldiers' Homes & Old Sailors' Homes
Provides supplemental funding and other assistance to qualifying retirement homes for former servicemen (owned and operated by independent foundations or provincial veterans' affairs bureaux) and establishes standards for the same; directly operates a smaller number of assisted living facilities for severely disabled veterans.
Notes
- ↑ Among other arguments, dissenting historians contend that Federalist performance on the battlefield did not improve after 1933 as the Arms Executive became irrelevant, though defenders retort that by this point the proverbial damage had already been done.