When war was declared, the Army Ordnance Department had ninety-seven officers. It now has 5,000 in America and abroad, and in the first year of the war had spent $4,756,500,000. To its peace-time task of administering eleven small Government arsenals has been added the problem of getting quick production of shells of all calibres, rifles, ammunition, grenades, and bombs from some 1,400 private manufacturing establishments. It has acquired a total of 2,475,219 square feet of storage space, has 2,701,880 square feet more under construction, and requires 23,000,000 square feet altogether to store its supplies. It has miles of railroad sidings, all inclosed, including 50 miles of track especially built, and it handles 10,000 carloads of explosives a month, with the total steadily increasing. The complexity of the Ordnance Department's task may be seen in the fact that the number of items made and supplied to the troops totals about 100,000, ranging from the small firing pin of a rifle to a complete 16-inch gun and emplacement, or a motor truck or tractor. Reserves of all these spare parts must be maintained and ready for distribution. The Ordnance Department has had to create organizations, build new plants, finance them and to design as well as to manufacture not only the weapons themselves, but thousands of tools, gauges, and jigs required for their manufacture. For instance, the French Government offered the secret of the recoil mechanism in the carriages of its famous .75 guns. To manufacture these it was necessary to machine steel castings so accurately that they will not be off two-thousandths of an inch in a distance of more than six feet. BUILDING NEW PLANTS Never had machinery been built in the United States to work on so large a scale with such a degree of accuracy. The Ordnance Department had to persuade manufacturers to undertake this difficult work, to assist them financially to build a thirteen-acre plant, to purchase and manufacture $6,000,000 worth of special tools, and develop an organization to do this. The contract was signed on Nov. 1, 1917, and today the plant is completed and is turning out the recoil mechanisms. The Nitrate Division has under construction two plants for the manufacture of powder, costing $45,000,000 each. The Ordnance Department itself has provided for the army 1,400,000 rifles, has brought the production of them up to 45,000 a week, or enough to equip three army divisions; has secured deliveries on 17,000 machine guns and brought the rate of production of them from 20,000 to 225,000 a year. It has increased the rate of production of field guns, heavy and light, from 1,500 to 15,000 a year, and is manufacturing 35,000 motor trucks and tractors to haul them and their ammunition. It has remodeled the British Enfield rifle so that it can be produced in quantities to take American ammunition and adopted two new types of machine guns, the Browning, heavy and light.