In this era of swift, mechanized warfare, we all have to remember that what is modern today and up-to-date, what is efficient and practical, becomes obsolete and outworn tomorrow.
Even while the production line turns out airplanes, new airplanes are being designed on the drafting table.
Even as a cruiser slides down the launching ways, plans for improvement, plans for increased efficiency in the next model, are taking shape in the blueprints of designers.
Every day's fighting in Europe, on land, on sea, and in the air, discloses constant changes in methods of warfare. We are constantly improving and redesigning, testing new weapons, learning the lessons of the immediate war, and seeking to produce in accordance with the latest that the brains of science can conceive.
We are calling upon the resources, the efficiency and the ingenuity of the American manufacturers of war material of all kinds— airplanes and tanks and guns and ships, and all the hundreds of products that go into this material. The government of the United States itself manufactures few of the implements of war. Private industry will continue to be the source of most of this materiel, and private industry will have to be speeded up to produce it at the rate and efficiency called for by the needs of the times.
I know that private business cannot be expected to make all of the capital investment required for expansions of plants and factories and personnel which this program calls for at once. It would be unfair to expect industrial corporations or their investors to do this, when there is a chance that a change in international affairs may stop or curtail future orders a year or two hence.
Therefore, the government of the United States stands ready to advance the necessary money to help provide for the enlargement of factories, the establishment of new plants, the employment of thousands of necessary workers, the development of new sources of supply for the hundreds of raw materials required, the development of quick mass transportation of supplies. And the details of all of this are now being worked out in Washington, day and night.
We are calling on men now engaged in private industry to help us in carrying out this program and you will hear more of this in detail in the next few days.
This does not mean that the men we call upon will be engaged in the actual production of this materiel. That will still have to be carried on in the plants and factories throughout the land. Private industry will have the responsibility of providing the best, speediest and most efficient mass production of which it is capable. The functions of the businessmen whose assistance we are calling upon will be to coordinate this program—to see to it that all of the plants continue to operate at maximum speed and efficiency.
Patriotic Americans of proven merit and of unquestioned ability in their special fields are coming to Washington to help the government with their training, their experience and their capability.