hesitancy in acting more forcefully to prepare for entering the war. In the midst of the public debate, military officials were quite aware of their forces’ poor state of readiness for war. They began to explore the issue in some depth.
• The General Staff spent most of 1915 preparing the Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States and 30 supplemental documents. One section recommended stockpiling as many essential supplies as possible for the initial use of any troops committed to battle.
• Separately, the Army War College prepared a study titled Mobilization of Industries and Utilization of the Commercial and Industrial Resources of the Country for War Purposes in Emergency. That report suggested giving the President broad powers to order civilian manufacturers to produce( at a fair price) any requested materials, and to seize any industries that did not comply with his requests.
• In October 1915, the US Navy established the Naval Consulting Board as the first official agency charged with coordinating at least some parts of government and private industry. During the first nine months of 1916, a subcommittee called the Industrial Preparedness Committee( IPC) supervised the conduct of an extensive inventory of more than 30,000 industrial plants to determine their capacity for producing war materials. The survey’ s results were not as useful as promised; they did not include any plans for converting production to military uses and did not correlate production capacity with any list of potential product requirements from the Army or Navy.
• In December 1915, a board of senior Army officers suggested to the War Department that the government should purchase the great bulk of its military supplies from the civilian economy, and only operate its own factories to produce such items as small arms, artillery and ammunition. It urged close cooperation between the military and civilian economies, but it made no suggestions as to how to accomplish that goal.
It’ s difficult to find any tangible actions that followed the production of these reports and surveys. However, it’ s easy to suggest that the visible activities of the various boards and committees did help
World War I poster issued by the National Industrial Conservation Movement, which shows Uncle Sam firing a cannon labeled“ American industry” shooting supplies and munitions to“ The Allies” on a distant shore, 1917.
awaken elements of American society to the potential mobilization for war. Perhaps for the first time in the nation’ s history, these reports helped all parties acknowledge the important role the newly-industrialized civilian economy would have in providing the country’ s military forces with the materials that would be needed for war.
The National Defense Act of June 1916 moved the United States a bit closer to mobilization by requiring manufacturers to give priority to government orders for military material. It authorized the Secretary of War to conduct an inventory of all facilities capable of producing arms and munitions, and to determine the advisability of using civilian or government-owned factories for munitions production. The five-person board assigned the latter task recommended using civilian manufacturers. Thus, they ratified the aforementioned de facto situation with Remington and Winchester, and paved the way for massive increases in the orders given to them in 1917 and beyond.
Enabling Full-Scale Mobilization
In August 1916, Congress created the Council of National Defense( CND) and its National Defense Advisory Committee( NDAC). These organizations were
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
18 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2017 | www. MoAF. org