Immediately after World War I, the Army took stock of its efforts in the campaign. One issue that was glaringly obvious to the Army was that the vast industrial power of the US had failed to produce weapons of all sorts on the scale needed to support a mass mobilization.
The Army was, of course, terribly short on money in the inter-war years. Nevertheless, in 1926, the Army founded the Army Industrial College. The AIC wasn't so much a school teaching its students, but rather a think tank that studied industry in America, with an eye toward what militarily useful products could be produced when needed. It cataloged which industries used what sort of machining, who used which skilled workers, and how their supply chains flowed from raw material to finished product.
When mobilization began just before World War II, when the Army needed a weapon produced, they had the data set to tell them which companies would be best suited to make it on a massive scale.
The catalog and mobilization effort were far from perfect. But the Army and the nation were far better prepared to become the Arsenal of Democracy than they had ever been before.
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