Home Defence we ought to be ready at any moment to send abroad three Army Corps with the proper Cavalry Division ... 120,000 men". He proposed to divide the nation into six geographical corps districts, each of which would contain the appropriate units during peacetime which it would command in war. The First and Second Corps, of regulars, would be based at Aldershot and Salisbury Plain; a Third Corps, mostly regulars, would be based in Ireland. These three would constitute the force for overseas service. The Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Corps would be composed of a mixture of regular and auxiliary forces, with sixty selected "first-line" Volunteer and Militia battalions. The remaining auxiliary forces would be assigned for defensive purposes to whichever corps they were located under. The Yeomanry, meanwhile, would be heavily expanded and reformed as Imperial Yeomanry, the mounted infantry having proved of great use in South Africa. This scheme could of course not be implemented whilst the South African War was in progress, but even in peacetime it was slow to take effect; in March 1903 a report gave the Fifth and Sixth Corps as "not yet formed", large numbers of the component units for other corps were unavailable, not yet organised, or simply quartered in the wrong locations, and perhaps most remarkably, the First Corps had no brigadiers to command it—they were to be assigned on mobilisation. Shortly thereafter, Hugh Arnold-Forster was appointed Secretary of State for War. One of his first acts was to appoint Lord Esher to chair a committee on War Office reform; this would culminate in the Esher Report of 1904, which called for a number of administrative reforms, including the formation of the Army Council. In the summer of 1904, the Norfolk Commission, which had been set up to consider the existing state of the Militia and Volunteers, issued its report. It advocated a form of compulsory service—which was swiftly rejected by the Government—but also offered various more pragmatic reforms which were later taken up as part of the Haldane Reforms. The state of the Militia was reported as "unfit to take the field", and the Volunteer Force was "not qualified .. against a Regular Army". For the time being, however, Arnold-Forster pressed ahead with his reforms, proposing on 14 July 1904—to strong opposition—that the Regular Army be split into a General Service Army (liable for peacetime service at home and