Thus it will be seen that it took England nearly four years to completely equip her army with artillery and ammunition. On that basis we had two years and five months to go before incomplete equipment with American-made artillery could have been condemned, with justification, as poor performance. The nineteen months which the war lasted after America’s entry did not give sufficient time for our industrial power to make itself fully felt. Even so, I don’t suppose that any one, save perhaps the profiteers, would wish the war to have lasted long enough for us to prove that we could produce artillery as rapidly as our allies. It should be kept in mind that proper strategy demanded an ordnance programme designed to insure an _ultimate_ overwhelming and continuous rate of production rather than a lesser rate of production at an earlier date. What I wish to get across to you (pardon the slang) is that the primary object of Ordnance was not to obtain immediate production of enough artillery and ammunition to equip our little First Contingent, but to obtain a _rate of production_ which would provide for the equipment of the army of 5,000,000 men which it had been decided to raise. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one that a housewife could buy a stove and bake a dozen loaves of bread in far less time than would be required to build a bakery and bake enough bread to feed an entire city. But the rate of production from the housewife’s oven would never feed the city. So it was with ordnance. By the sacrifice of far more important considerations, there is no doubt that enough guns could have been produced in a comparatively short time to equip the first few divisions. In order to do this, time was required for building plants capable of such a rate of production. We had to obtain designs and even, in certain cases, to discard existing designs, in order to get manufacturing plants on a basis permitting such a rate of production. It would have been madness to have sacrificed production in 1920 to force a quicker but far smaller production in 1918. The Ordnance Department was not directing its efforts to obtain for American arms an immediate but isolated success, gratifying as such a success would have been to American pride; instead it was building a machine which would make an ultimate and sweeping victory absolutely certain.