"The total cost of navy-yards up to June 30th, 1910, with land, public works, improvements, machinery, and maintenance, including repairs, amounts to $320,600,000.
"Overburdened with a superfluous number of navy-yards distributed along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Louisiana, in 1910 I recommended that Congress give up and dispose of naval stations at New Orleans, Pensacola, San Juan, Port Royal, New London, Sackett's Harbor(New York), Culebra,and Cavité, none of which was a first-class station. The average yearly cost of maintaining these stations between 1905 and 1910 was $1,672,675, and very little useful work had been performed at any of them. Later, I practically closed them, but could not abolish or dispose of them, no action having been taken by Congress. Pensacola and New Orleans have since been reopened by my successor.
"The interests of the country and the interests of the Navy would be best served by one first-class naval base with sufficient anchorage for the entire fleet, north of the Delaware, equipped for docking, repairing, etc., and another station of equal capacity at Norfolk, in Chesapeake Bay, with Guantanamo, Cuba, to serve as the winter-station rendezvous.
"On the Pacific coast we are fortunate in having only two naval stations, one at Bremerton, on Puget Sound, established in 1891, with ample depth of water, costing to date about $9,000,000; and the other at Mare Island, established in 1850, some thirty miles from the harbor of San Francisco, with inadequate depth and width of water along its water-front. The total costs, with maintenance and repairs, have amounted to $35,000,000, and, on account of insufficient depth of water, none of the battleships built in the last eight years could have been berthed there....
"Building battleships without an adequate force of men is equal to wasting money; only ten ships of the first line and eleven of the second, according to the Navy Department, can be placed in full commission for service, due to a shortage of men and officers.
"To provide a proper complement for all vessels of the Navy which could still be made useful would require an additional force of 18,556 men and 933 line officers, according to the testimony of Admiral Badger before the Naval Committee, December 8, 1914.
"That we have not been getting proper return for money expended in the Navy is not known to the majority of our people, nor is it realized to what extent political influences have misdirected the appropriations during the past twenty-five years. The remedy will only come from absolute publicity.
"Let a special committee be appointed to investigate the conditions in the Navy.
"Let a special committee of military experts from the Army and Navy be appointed to recommend what naval stations shall be abolished and sold and if any shall be established to take their places.