civilized countries. This general governmental need is the first need of our army and navy.

Roughly stated, our national defensive needs, as discussed in the above enumerated report of the General Staff. and as agreed to by all competent military and naval authorities, are comprised under the following heads:

First-An adequate and efficient navy as the primary line of defense.

Second-An adequate system of coast defense to prevent the naval bombardment of our principal seaports and cities.

Third-A small but highly efficient regular army to serve in time of peace as a protection against civil disorder; in time of war as a temporary protection against invasion; and in times of both peace and war to be a pattern and nucleus for the organization of the larger citizens' army upon which, in any serious conflict, our protection must ultimately depend.

Fourth-A citizens' army composed of men who do not make arms their vocation, but who have been willing to spend a short portion of their lives in undergoing the training which modern methods of war make absolutely necessary as a condition of usefulness on the battlefield.

A very brief discussion of the deficiencies of each one of these four classes and the need of immediate steps to remedy it is all that can be brought within the scope of this report.

THE NAVY.

In our need of an adequate and efficiency navy the United States comes second only to Great Britain. We have 21,000 miles of coast line and a rapidly increasing commerce to defend. The general purpose of a navy is purely defensive, although tactically it must always be able to act on the offensive for the purpose of making effective defense of the country. Standing by itself, a navy is not designed for military aggression, such as the invasion of another country. Its function, on the contrary, is to defend our own country and our commerce against such aggression. Yet, in order to do this, it must be able to seek the enemy's fleet and attack it wherever the conditions for American success are most certain. To scatter the fleet or to tie it down to operations near our own coast is to destroy its real defensive ability. In the Napoleonic wars, England was saved from invasion by victories of her fleet which took place hundreds of miles away from her coasts; and a policy which would prevent our own fleet from adopting such a course of operation would be hazardous to our safety.

These considerations, in addition to the fact that we have distant foreign possessions, require that we should have a sea-going navy of adequate size and efficiency. The many vital questions which are still unsettled in naval tactics require that we should have a navy which is up-to-date in all of the various branches of the service.

As a matter of fact, naval authorities today agree that not only has our navy been falling behind, in its general relative strength, to that of other nations, but it is strikingly

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deficient in certain vital particulars. It is extremely short in personnel; it is deficient in the number of our capital ships; it has no battle cruisers and practically no scout cruisers; it is extremely lacking in effective submarines and destroyers.

In view of the fact that the navy is practically our only existing defense today, its needs should meet with the promptest and most earnest attention.

COAST DEFENSE.

Our system of coast defense is the best relative condition of any of our land defenses. But its function is very limited. Its purpose is merely to protect our sea-coast cities from a naval raid and damage such as recently befell Scarborough and Hartlepool. It offers no defense against an enemy who has control of the sea and can land an army at any unprotected point of our huge coast line.

Even in our coast defense there are great deficiencies. Our military policy contemplates that its personnel should be supplied half from the regular army and half from the militia. Substantially 50 per cent. of each of these two quotas is lacking and in the case of a sudden emergency, against which it is the purpose of the coast defense to be a protection, many of our forts would be hopelessly undermanned. The amount of ammunition is deficient. The plans of our military advisers contemplate only sufficient ammunition for an hour's firing. The actual supply at present is very considerably behind even that most modest standard and, in many cases of our most important seacoast guns, would be sufficient for only thirty or forty minutes' firing.

THE CITIZENS' ARMY.

It has been the historic policy of this country to depend upon a voluntary army of citizens, called out at the outbreak of war, to defend it in case of any serious conflict. The development of the art of war during the last half-century has been such as to make radical changes in this policy necessary if it is to be successful. Hitherto we have relied upon training and equipping our volunteers after the outbreak of war. In our previous wars we have escaped disaster under this method largely on account of conditions which will in all probability never occur again. In the Civil War we were fighting against an enemy who was as unprepared as ourselves. Each side trained the other as the conflict proceeded. In the War of 1812 we were fighting a nation which was almost wholly absorbed in a great European war and which spent very little attention upon us. Yet in that war we called out, from first to last, 527,000 men to defend us against an enemy which never had a force of 16,000 men in the field at any one time, and whose total forces throughout the war aggregated only about 54,000 altogether. We were defeated in most of our battles, and we lost our capitol at Washington after a force of 5,400 untrained Americans had run away from less than 1,500 British on suffering a loss of only eight killed.

We can safely assume that any serious antagonist whom

we shall have in the future will not be unprepared. Modern war is fought with weapons which require time to construct and training to use to an extent hitherto unknown. Our citizens today are wholly unaccustomed to the use of the military rifle, let alone the modern field piece. The training, equipment and discipline of the modern army is much more complicated than that of fifty years ago and requires very much greater time and expert knowledge. The conditions surrounding the raising and equipment of a force of citizen soldiery have therefore completely changed since the Civil War. To attempt to organize such a force of volunteers in the way in which we did it then would be to invite disaster against practically any army of modern Europe.

TRAINING OF MEN AND OFFICERS.

Under these circumstances it is inevitable that new and broader foundations must be laid for the creation of a body of citizen soldiery in time of war; provision must be made for the training of a force of reserve officers to constitute the junior officers of such a force. Steps have already been taken by the War Department, in the institution of summer camps, where young school and college graduates can, in association with the reguar army, get a brief intensive training. We believe that this should be supplemented by a legislation permitting the graduates of such camps to obtain temporary commissions as junior officers in the regular army, on condition of becoming thereafter reserve officers, subject to call in time of war.

Provision should also be made for general training in rifle shooting among our young men both in schools and in colleges. To this end we call attention to the steps which have already been taken in Switzerland and Australia-two of the most advanced and liberal governments in the world-where, from early boyhood, their young men are trained to use the rifle as a necessary part of their education. In these two countries representing in their respective ways the most advanced types of modern democracy and going hand in hand with their freedom of thought and liberalism we find the doctrine that every man owes to his country not only to die for her if necessary but also to spend a little of his life in learning how to die for her effectively. We believe that the institution of a somewhat similar system in this country is not only highly important with a view to its defense in the time of war but we believe that the necessary self-control and discipline which is inherent to such training would be highly conducive to the moral, mental and physical betterment of our youth in time of peace.

WAR MATERIAL.

Finally we find that there is a great shortage in the material in this country necessary to equip a citizens' army for war; particularly in the vital element of field artillery and field artillery ammunition. Such equipment cannot be extemporized nor can it always be purchased after war breaks

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out. It takes at least five months for the manufacture of a modern battery of field guns within the United States. At present we have in stock but little more than half the necessary number of field guns to equip a citizens' army of the minimum size believed by our military advisers to be necessary. And we have ammunition sufficient to serve those guns at the rate ammunition is now used, rather less than one day and a half of fighting. We are very insufficient in aeroplanes, being outranked by at least thirteen other nations. Immediate steps

should be taken to bring up these shortages.

Taken as a whole, we find that the condition of military unpreparedness of the United States is most serious and lamentable. We believe it is the duty of our citizens, without respect to party, to take the present occasion, when the interest of the country has been aroused by the European war, for insisting that Congress give to the subject its most earnest attention to the end that the foregoing deficiencies may be speedily remedied.

(National Security League, Document No. 2; 1915.)

(b) [$240] Organization of a Modern Army.

BY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR HENRY J. BRECKENRIDGE

(December, 1915).

Five years ago about this time I was sitting in the office of a prominent Baltimore attorney. I was talking army to him. He was an unusually intelligent man, conservative, fairly learned, at least in the law, and with a reasonable knowledge of affairs. In the course of the conversation he asked me: "Why should a man go into the army? What is there in it to make it a life work? After he has learned to drill and shoot, his life is simply a matter of routine. Larger talents do not bring any larger financial returns. And, altogether, I cannot see that the army is any place for a man who wishes to make the most of his resources, intellect and character."

The attitude of this man is not an uncommon one among intelligent Americans. The European war has drawn the attention of the public mind to things military to an unwonted degree. But there remains on the part of many people a lack of appreciation of what the military service is, of what is required to make a soldier and an officer, and of the fact that the military profession, of a verity, is a learned profession. Despite the vivid demonstration of the last year, there still lingers the impression in some quarters that all you have to do to make a soldier is to put a uniform on his back, shoes on his feet, rifle in his hand, give him ammunition, a knapsack, and the untrained American patriot is prepared to cope with the best trained soldier in the world. The task yet remains to dispel completely the illusion that a sword in the hand, a strap on the shoulder, and the fire of patriotism in the eye of the American volunteer are all that is required to make an officer fit to lead the improvised soldier to victorious conflict with trained armies.

PURPOSE OF THE ARTICLE.

What is endeavored to be demonstrated in this article is that the army is a learned profession; that to be a successful officer of the army requires as high a development of the intellect and character as is needed for success in any other learned profession; that the army is not only a learned profession, but that it is a learned profession with as many intricate, clearly defined, and difficult specialties as are to be found, for instance, in the great profession of medicine.

There are two great divisions of the military profession-first, technical, and, second, tactical and strategical.

I. TECHNICAL.

As medicine has a surgeon, oculist, aurist, gynecologist, pediatrician, psychiatrist, and other specialists, so the army has its surgeon, judge advocate, quartermaster, ordnance officer, engineer and signal officers. The average officer is no more or less fit to perform without preliminary instruction the duties of an ordnance officer, for instance, than is an obstetrician fit to perform an operation for cataract.

ORDNANCE DEPARTMENT.

Where do the rifles, bayonets, pistols, scabbards, cartridges, packs, harness, field guns, and mammoth coast artillery cannon come from? Who makes them? Who designs them? The officer of ordnance. A small cartridge looks a simple thing. We speak glibly of great numbers of rifles. Smokeless powder and other high explosives we know to be essential. But we have very little appreciation of what it means to provide them. How many of us appreciate the intricate chemical and mechanical processes required in the manufacture of smokeless powder? How many of us realize that thirty-three complete chemical and mechanical operations have to be gone through with accurately, precisely, carefully, before white cotton, mixed with sulphuric and nitric acids, becomes smokeless powder? And after, with elaborate processes, the powder is made at the Picatinny Arsenal, it must travel from Dover, N. J., to Frankford Arsenal, outside Philadelphia, there to be but an element in the forty complete manufacturing and assembling operations that are required to make a rifle cartridge.

A rifle is a more or less simple-looking mechanism, but to make this rifle 1,223 separate manufacturing operations must be executed.

One round of three-inch shrapnel means 355 operations; to make an automatic pistol, 614, and for the terrible little mitrailleuse, or machine gun, 1,990. The lightest three-inch field gun costs $1,400, and requires in the making a number of different operations the enumeration of which would be exceedingly tire

some.

And through the different calibres we come to the fourteeninch coast defense gun made at Watervliet Arsenal at Albany, weighing, when finishing, 138,000 pounds and costing $55,000, and wound about with 37,000 pounds of wire. The disappearing