Given the recent National French landings on the isle of Crete, which our brave forces and citizens are hotly contesting on that island's beaches, harbors, and towns, it is clearer than ever to the King and his government that the overstretched military, given its three conflicting commitments in Albania, Macedonia, and Crete, needs to be expanded dramatically. Although 185,000 trained and many hardened regulars are doing a good enough job holding off the Albano-Turkish threat under the leadership of General Papagos, there is a major dearth of fresh soldiery in the south due to the Army's need for every last man to be at the front. Yes, there are a few brigades in Athens, Patras, and Corinth, among others, and the Navy and air arm have strong presences in Salamis, Patras, and the capital city itself, but almost all of those forces are dedicated to training new troops to send north and are tasked with defending Southern Greece from attack.

Greece is also close to being broke- as an incredibly poor nation among a region known to be home to most of the pauper-states of Europe, it cannot afford to spend much relying on the credit markets of the world. Nevertheless, the Kingdom and its people are engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the greatest enemy the Greeks have faced since the days of Xerxes the Great. As such, the Ministry of Finance, in coordination with the Central Bank of Greece, have greatly restricted trading on the Athens Bourse and have instituted capital controls on all assets currently held in Greek territory to prevent capital flight; the drachma's exchange rate has been locked into place, with the government's gold reserves and currency basket backing it, at 20 drachmas to the dollar (which is about a 5% drop from the former rate) and 25 drachmas to the RM (which is about a 7.5% drop from the rate that used to float on the market). In addition, the Papandreou Cabinet has decided to administer a quick, albeit brutal, economic shock on the Greek people: mirroring the Canadians' abandonment of the gold standard in 1931, the drachma will become a fiat currency until, at the least, the end of the war.

With slightly more fiscal headroom to spare, given the temporary breathing space allowed by the freezing of the Greek credit market and the devaluation of the drachma, the government will begin training five more infantry divisions and one armored division (equipped with a mix of French, American, and 3I tanks) in the Peloponnesus and in Attica. Along the strategic (and logistically critical) shipping hubs of Piraeus, Patras, and Corinth, chain gangs, prisoners of war, and voluntary laborers will fortify those places' naval defenses further and lug in artillery suitable for defending those locations against a naval landing. On the side, Greek military engineers, with the help of their unskilled labor force, will begin rigging the strategic Corinth Canal with explosives in case the Ottomans or French manage a landing there. In addition, 300k reservists will be called to the flag, although most of them will merely be tasked with augmenting the navy's sailor body and manning most coastal fortifications in the South as an ad hoc militia force. It is hoped that this rapid expansion of the Greek military and the fortification networks that have protected the Greek heartland from attack thus far will permit our brave soldiers, sailors, and airmen to finally claim victory over the perfidious Ottomans within the year.