The law, in theory, assumes that the Secretary of War himself makes and signs contracts for the production of army supplies. He is permitted by law, however, to delegate his contracting function to accredited deputies, who are called contracting officers. In normal times these contracting officers are able to make all the necessary contracts; but during the war, with all industry aligning itself in the munitions organization, it became physically impossible for the regular contracting officers to handle all the business, and they in turn appointed deputies or proxies, and conferred on them (quite illegally, as it afterwards appeared) the right to sign contracts. Then, in the urgency of the occasion, the procurement officers, who were frequently business men commissioned in the military service, adopted the common business expedient of allowing correspondence to stand as evidence of contractual engagements, expecting to follow up this correspondence with formal contracts when the ponderous executive machinery of the Department could get around to it. Sometimes the producer did not even have the protection of correspondence, but, after coming to an oral understanding with the contracting officer as to what was to be done and on what terms, hurried back to his factory to spend, it might be, hundreds of thousands of dollars in preparation for some large manufacturing effort, without a scrap of writing to secure him in these investments. Finally, there was an extensive class of contracts which lacked correct form. New officers, unfamiliar with the restrictions which hedge about the governmental administrative acts, restrictions which the public calls red tape, took the short cut of making out direct purchase orders, which stipulated quality, quantity, price, method of payment, time of delivery, and so on; and the producers accepted such orders in good faith as binding agreements.