Mr. JAMES. But not likely.

Mr. TRIGG. It would depend upon the circumstances. The thought of our committee in this matter is that judgment will be used by the War Department in placing these orders with well-selected companies whose interest in the situation is assured, and who will be encouraged to put themselves in a position to supply the Government in case of necessity. We realize that that will be done at some additional expense, over and above the ordinary expenses that would be incurred, and that additional expense is one of the best items of insurance we could possibly spend.

Mr. JAMES. If we do not spend any more money on munitions than we are now spending, how could any firm get any orders unless we cut down the number of men we have in the arsenals?

Mr. TRIGG. I think perhaps that is a question that would be difficult for me to answer. Probably it would be a matter of internal adjustment of the expenditures of the department.

Perhaps General Ruggles could answer that question better than I could, if you would be willing to have him do it.

Mr. JAMES. What have you to say about that, General?

General RUGGLES. This bill, as you know, carries no appropriation. We hope that some time there will be more appropriations for munitions. We are carrying a very slender skeleton of an organization in all our arsenals.

But the time will come, we think and hope, when the people will realize the importance of having a reasonable munitions reserve to replace obsolete material and to get an accumulated reserve that will answer the purposes of national defense, a reserve that will be commensurate with the man power that we propose.

When that time comes we expect to use the money not only for the munitions but for training the industry upon which we must rely for over 90 per cent of our munitions in the event of war and to speed up the work of getting munitions to the troops in the event of a major war.

Mr. JAMES. Then this bill is supposed to be applicable at any time when Congress appropriates more money each year for additional munitions?

General RUGGLES. Absolutely. The bill carries no money, and it is only when there is money enough appropriated by Congress to permit advantage to be taken of the provisions of this bill that it will apply.

Mr. JAMES. If this bill should go through and you should get the money, it is then your intention to discharge men from the arsenals in order to place these orders with the factories?

General RUGGLES. No; we ought to keep our organizations in the arsenals. We have a program which you are probably familiar with our 10-year program of limited rearmament. We have in that, in addition to a provision for guns of various kinds, a provision for facilities. Those facilities are jigs, fixtures, and dies and gauges that are necessary for any plant to have to use for the manufacturing contemplated.

If we can get this law it is the intention to distribute small orders to the manufacturers who are engaged in this industrial program, and of course to those who would make that same type of gun during

a war.

The estimate under our 10-year program includes these facilities, with the idea that it will enhance the state of preparation very materially. But the amount of material we will get from commercial sources will not be of serious detriment to the arsenals.

Mr. JAMES. If the 10-year program goes through, is it your idea to give part of the orders to outside concerns and part to the Government arsenals?

General RUGGLES. Exactly.

Mr. JAMES. Do you expect to increase the number of men you now have at the arsenals?

General RUGGLES. No; not necessarily.

Mr. JAMES. That would mean that all the additional money would be placed with outside concerns.

General RUGGLES. The idea is that where an arsenal is going to manufacture the same kind of gun or carriage it will have a part of the order and the private concerns will have the balance. That was planned at the time the limited rearmament program was worked out.

Mr. JAMES. Why do you use the expression "educational orders"? General RUGGLES. Because they are necessary to train the manufacturers who do not make this material in time of peace in the art of manufacturing something entirely foreign to their regular line.

Mr. JAMES. If you omitted the word "educational" it would be just as broad, would it not?

General RUGGLES. The idea in using that word was merely that it would be descriptive of the purposes of the order. The purposes of the order are merely to train the manufacturers in the manufacture of munitions.

Take, for instance, the case of Mr. Ford. When he had to prepare for the manufacture of an entirely different model of automobile it took him over a year to do it. We are hoping, if we should get into a major war, that we will get munitions very early, because we do not carry a very large reserve.

Mr. JAMES. How much will the 10-year program cost?

General RUGGLES. In reply to the question of Mr. James, of Michigan, as to the total amount of money provided for facilities in the Ordnance Department 10-year program for extended service test and limited rearmament, the following is furnished:

Total amount of money covered by the program__.

Total amount of money provided for facilities and included in the above__

$21, 490, 800

4, 930, 000

The word "facilities " used above includes jigs, fixtures, dies, gauges, and special tools.

Mr. JAMES. And you are figuring that all of the $20,000,000 would be spent with outside concerns?

General RUGGLES. Only part of it.

Mr. JAMES. How much?

General RUGGLES. I have not worked it out that way. I suppose perhaps three fourths of it, or maybe half of it.

Mr. JAMES. About how much money would these outside concerns have to pay for jigs, dies, and so forth?

General RUGGLES. I do not remember the exact figures in this case. I do remember in the case of the 75 millimeter guns and carriages

31115-29-2

we figured that a set of jigs and fixtures would cost about the same as 12 guns and carriages for quantity production.

Mr. JAMES. About how much in money would that concern put up altogether, say, within a few hundred thousand dollars?

General RUGGLES. We would not give this all to one concern. Mr. JAMES. I know; it is going to be scattered all over the country. How much would all the manufacturers of the country use for dies, jigs, and fixtures?

General RUGGLES. It depends entirely upon the character of the work.

Mr. JAMES. What is your estimate?

General RUGGLES. My estimate for this particular 75-millimeter gun and carriage is about $300,000.

Mr. WURZBACH. What proportion of the munitions used by the War Department now are supplied by the arsenals, do you know? General RUGGLES. The consumption now is of war stocks. Practically we are making only experimental matériel at the arsenals. Those war stocks, of course, were 98 per cent produced by private industry during the war. The small-arm cartridges comprise the only item that we now make in quantity production. We are putting those in storage, and as long as we can use the old ammunition we use it.

Mr. WURZBACH. If you did not have this surplus on hand and had to get new supplies, you would still have to depend upon outside concerns for munitions, would you not?

General RUGGLES. No; our Government arsenals are sufficient to take care of the ordinary peace-time expenditures. They have a capacity of about 5 to 10 per cent of war-time expenditure. Of course now they are on nowhere near a capacity production basis.

Mr. WURZBACH. Would they be able to exactly supply the demands, or do you think they are equipped so they could furnish more than the peace-time needs?

General RUGGLES. In some cases they could furnish more.

Mr. WURZBACH. But now very much in excess of the peace-time needs, assuming you had no surplus on hand?

General RUGGLES. It depends on what you mean by peace-time needs. If you mean what would be consumed in target practice or would wear out, we can more than do it. We conceive, however, that our peace-time needs would eventually mean the building up of a reserve and to have enough of a reserve to carry over until munitions could be obtained in sufficient amounts from new production started after war is declared.

Mr. WURZBACH. After you once get the reserve, then the outflow, due to the use of the munitions and the obsolescence, would be about the same?

General RUGGLES. Yes. That is, we could do that if we should run all our arsenals to maximim capacity in most cases. We could not do that for powder, but for shoulder rifles and their ammunition and certain artillery and artillery carriages we could.

Mr. WURZBACH. You said this proposed legislation did not carry any authorization for appropriations. It is true, however, that if we were to enact this legislation, and thereby adopt the policy provided for in this legislation, it would be a pretty clear indication

that in the future we would ask for authorizations to carry out the policy.

General RUGGLES. The thought is that the adoption of the policy would merely permit us when Congress saw fit to appropriate money for the manufacture of munitions to distribute a reasonable part of it among those manufacturers who will be used in connection with this program for manufacturing in the event of war and give them experience.

But it is not intended to ask for specific sums for that purpose. That is, when Congress considers that munitions are needed we want to buy some from private manufacturers instead of all from the Government arsenals.

Mr. HUGHES. In view of the fact that there are continuous improvements in these munitions, do you think it would be wise for the Government to buy these articles in advance? Might there not be times when improvements would be made and when we would have to buy new munitions to keep up with the improved conditions?

General RUGGLES. If we are going to be prepared for war we have to have a certain amount of munitions, because we can not start with no munitions and get them in time for our troops to use. Munitions

can not be manufactured as rapidly as troops can be mobilized. Mr. HUGHES. How much time would you have to have for that? Say, for instance, war was to be declared to-morrow; how much time would it take for them to get ready?

General RUGGLES. It took the Allies two years. At the end of the Battle of the Marne everybody ran out of munitions-the Germans and the French and the English. There are volumes of testimony on that point to the effect that they could not move because they had no munitions to allow them to advance. At times while sections of every front were threatened with irretrievable disaster. That is history. Then they went into trench warfare. That was so because everybody was in the same fix.

It was not until the Battle of the Somme that they had built up their manufacturing capacity to enable them to make a sufficient quantity of munitions to enable them to get into action, and the Battle of the Somme was the first big battle on the western front that they could get into after they got a sufficient quantity of munitions. That is the reason why they had the trench warfare.

Just consider what might have happened later on in the World War, in the spring of 1918, when the last major German drive took place. What was the condition in this country?

If the Germans had won that drive and had taken the English Fleet and had come over here and had driven our fleet to cover or rather sunk it-because it probably would not have taken coverwhat did we have in this country?

We had been in the war over a year, and had started to make munitions as soon as we could, but they had not begun to come through in any quantity.

We did not have an infantry rifle for every infantry soldier, and we had practically no mobile cannon ammunition at all. We had a few mobile cannon of pre-war manufacture. There was plenty of man power, but it was without munition power. An army means man power plus munition power. We had the man power, but we had no munition power a year after the war was declared.

It took Mr. Ford over a year to change simply from one model of an automobile to another. How can you expect a multigraph factory or a typewriter factory to be able to make fuses in a few months if it took Henry Ford over a year to change from one model of automobile to another?

Mr. HUGHES. That is the reason I asked the question. Would you not get so much improvement in one year's time so that what was used the year prior would be practically useless, just as in the case of an automobile now when it goes on the market in competition with other automobiles. I take it that same condition would apply in war.

General RUGGLES. When we go into the next war we will have to go in with what we have on hand for over a year. We can not expect to have the latest things, but we have to have something with which the troops can defend themselves. It would be better to have a gun 10 or 15 years old than to have no gun.

The same thing is true with other munitions. We never would go into a war with the latest type of weapons.

The CHAIRMAN. How much time elapsed from the time we entered the World War until we delivered the first American-made cannon in Europe?

General RUGGLES. Outside of some few cannon made before the war, we practically did not deliver any until just before the armistice. The CHAIRMAN. I mean from the time we entered the war-cannon made in this country after we entered the war.

General RUGGLES. In about 18 months we got over a few cannon, but not many.

The CHAIRMAN. That applies, to a great extent, to all kinds of ammunition manufactured in this country, does it not?

General RUGGLES. Except small arms and small-arms ammunition and a very few rounds of artillery ammunition and a very few guns, there were practically no munitions used in the World War by our troops that were made in this country. At the very end we did get over a few Browning machine guns, a few cannon, and a few rounds of artillery ammunition. But it was practically nothing.

Except for small arms and ammunition therefor, our troops fought the war with munitions obtained abroad, because we could not make them in time in this country.

We were like the Allies; we could not make them in 6 months or 8 months or 9 months or a year. It takes a year and a half to start a factory making these things in quantity production. They were just beginning to get into quantity production at the end of the war.

The CHAIRMAN. It was practically a year and a half after we were in the war before we were able to deliver all kinds of munitions in commercial quantities?

General RUGGLES. How is that?

The CHAIRMAN. It was a year and a half after we entered the war before we were able to deliver munitions in commercial quantities? General RUGGLES. To our troops; that is a fact, except for small arms. It was 15 or 16 months. And that was not a discreditable thing. It was just in line with the experience of the other countries. Mr. WRIGHT. General, is it contemplated that the War Department and the Navy Department give these commercial concerns orders for quantity production?