Beyond Strategy: The Quest for Effective Implementation in Defense Mobilization

Mobilizing and engaging small businesses to support national defense has long challenged the Defense Department. 

During the opening session of the Truman Commission, Undersecretary of War Patterson highlighted the difficulty in engaging small businesses during the Second World War, stating

Speed is of the essence, and speed made it necessary that orders be placed with concerns with whom preliminary arrangements for production of munitions had been made under the industrial mobilization plan in the years preceding the emergency. We needed medium tanks in large numbers, of uniform design, and we needed them quickly. We made contracts for them with Chrysler, Baldwin Locomotive, and American Locomotive. It would have been folly to have ignored the great productive facilities of these concerns and to have placed our business with companies that could not produce quickly.¹

The War Department ultimately found ways to mobilize small businesses and increase the labor supply during the war. 

Unfo…