Holy Dragon Empire - Military
Hierarchy
The HDE is extremely hirearchical - with clear levels of government, military ranks, and the rest all the way up to the Council and the Emperor.
Military rank:
Their military is based on the star - a group of five soldiers with complimentary skills and specializations. Each member of the star is called, simply, a 'baka' - Soldier, in Draconic. Each star is led by a Legate, who acts as the voice of the team and determines its composition and general actions in service of its missions.
A group of 5 stars is known as a Cohort, and represents the smallest force fielded by the HDE for any miliitary goal; while individual stars may have specific tasks, Cohorts are assigned objectives.
Four Cohorts make up a Century, which is a common tactical deployment representing something akin to the modern Platoon - in general, three cohorts are fighting teams, while the fourth cohort is administrative and support staff for the soldierss on the ground.
Ten centuries make up a Legion; currently, the HDE boasts twelve legions of ground troops.
Tactics:
the HDE does not field mass line troops - the Kobold aversion to attriition shines through in their field tactics, which prefer ranged weapons to soften the enemy, raking attacks from airships or sappers to bog them down, and then great crashing assaults from cavalry or shock troopers to break the spirit of their foe.
Their miliitary doctrine relies heavily on 'dirty tactics', stealth, mobility, and opportunistic strikes, and only rarely will they defend any stretch of ground 'to the death', instead choosing to allow losses if it means they can pick their own ground on which to mount a stand.
Cohorts are extremely good at their specialties - the HDE focuses on skill development and heavy teamwork with complimentary skills. Cohorts are often deployed in mutually supporting roles, which make their actions extremely fault tolerant and extremely effective when coordinated properly.
Most HDE troops are specialists, in some way.
Equipment:
The most technically advanced army ever seen, the HDE has leveraged the Kobold penchant for invention and the discovery of the secrets of ancient elven airship technology into a terrifying force.
Firearms are prevalent, along with explosives - with their most devastating weapons being the Dragonsbreath Cannons, which come in multiple versions that throw bolts of lightning with every shot. All standard troopers are well-equipped and armored.
Specialist teams leverage artificery to come with any number of dirty tricks, from escape-teleport batons to shock nets to explosives to magical-technological weapons of all stripes.
On top of that? The HDE has invented the warforged - a metal body that is capable of handling the soul of a volunteer, often a soldier who has been greviously wounded or permanently rendered incapable through action. The Warforged are extremely powerful combatants, no longer requiring sleep, food, or breath, retaining all of their skills in life and now in a nearly indestructible body.