Going a couple of pages back Saphroneth what do you think about the Childers and Cardwell reforms? To me the abolition of flogging, the end of purchase, creation of useful reserves and two battalion regiments all seem fairly sensible.
Going through the components you mention, drawing on occasion from
past discussion with Robcraufurd:
1) Abolition of flogging. This is one of those things which is a good idea, but which isn't as much of a reform as it sounds as the system already heavily restricted flogging - it was kind of the last-resort punishment.
2) End of purchase. Much like the Duke of Cambridge notes, this has the purpose of a good-behaviour bond.
In isolation, getting rid of it is a good idea, as it means the officer corps is theoretically open to a broader base of society (i.e. those who could not actually afford purchase) - but the thing is, promotions for cause were already exempted from the requirement to purchase, it served the automatic function of being a pension for officers (they sold their commission) and everyone who attained a commission through purchase already had to pass exams.
The real bugbear, however, is that it abolishing it was quite expensive. This is a problem if you're trying to
cut costs in the military, as Cardwell was doing, as it means you have to get really sweeping with cost cutting.
3) Creation of useful reserves.
The reserves is a tricky thing, because part of the principle behind the reserve system is that it be possible to mobilize a large additional force in time of emergency.
This has both pros and cons - but the chief problem the reserve system
as originally considered has is that it reduces the service time. Part of what made the British Army of the 1860s the buzz-saw it has been in this TL is that the average soldier (counting re-enlistment at the end of the first stretch) served for an average of seventeen years, meaning that the average battalion's regulars are seven years or more in the job - while the reserves system leans far too heavily on younger men for the active duty force and low-service-time men for the reserves.
This also points something out - Britain is an empire. Right now in the TL there's garrison forces spread all over the shop, plus three wars going on at once (New Zealand, South Carolina and to some extent Japan) and in the past few years there's been Trent, India, Crimea, China and Persia - and there's an expedition to Afghanistan percolating through the Imperial bureaucracy.
The point is - reserves work best if you expect to fight a very dangerous war in tight time constraints. The British expect to be more or less continually fighting brushfire wars, for which you need long service regulars simply because men who join up at the minimum age won't be eligible for overseas service for several more years... and if you've got short service, then you can only send them out for a couple of years anyway.
Robcraufurd has at times done pieces on the Cardwell reforms' problems, you can search for Cardwell under his name on this site and find plenty on this aspect in particular.
4) Two battalion regiments.
This is related to the above, in that it's linked to the short service idea. Under Cardwell, one battalion serves abroad and the other stays at home training recruits. As such, every year the home battalion is stripped of its best men: when it's called on to serve in a war, therefore, it has vast numbers of men unfit for service which it has to slough off and replace with reservists.
Essentially, the Cardwell reforms are really kind of problematic for the kind of war the UK was expecting to fight, and also had rather dire consequences for the status of the army as a respectable occupation.
Under Cardwell's short service, men about 25 years old discharged onto the job market with no useful skills, resulting in a chronic problem of soldier's unemployment; under the older long service system, the average man re-upped and served in the army until his late thirties or early forties, after which point he had a pension to support him.
If the reforms had been aimed at the kind of army that the UK actually needed, I think they would have worked rather better. Instead it tries to fit a Prussian square peg into a British triangular hole.
