It is important to have our Navy of adequate size, but it is even more important that ship for ship it should equal in efficiency any navy in the world.

Good ships and good guns are simply good weapons, and the best weapons are useless save in the hands of men who know how to fight with them.

Every effort must be made to exalt the main function of the officer--the command of men.

This General Board, by fostering the creation of a general staff, is providing for the official and then the general recognition of our altered conditions as a Nation and of the true meaning of a great war fleet, which meaning is, first…

But in addition we should at once provide for a National Naval Reserve, organized and trained under the direction of the Navy Department, and subject to the call of the Chief Executive whenever war becomes imminent.

The American people must either build and maintain an adequate navy or else make up their minds definitely to accept a secondary position in international affairs, not merely in political, but in commercial, matters.

It has been well said that there is no surer way of courting national disaster than to be "opulent, aggressive, and unarmed.

The conditions of modern war are such as to make an infinitely heavier demand than ever before upon the individual character and capacity of the officer and the enlisted man, and to make it far more difficult for men to act together with…

At present the fighting must be done in extended order, which means that each man must act for himself and at the same time act in combination with others with whom he is no longer in the old-fashioned elbow-to-elbow touch.

Under such conditions a few men of the highest excellence are worth more than many men without the special skill which is only found as the result of special training applied to men of exceptional physique and morale.

But nowadays the most valuable fighting man and the most difficult to perfect is the rifleman who is also a skillful and daring rider.

The American cavalryman, trained to manoeuvre and fight with equal facility on foot and on horseback, is the best type of soldier for general purposes now to be found in the world.

The ideal cavalryman of the present day is a man who can fight on foot as effectively as the best infantryman, and who is in addition unsurpassed in the care and management of his horse and in his ability to fight on horseback.

A system should be adopted by which there shall be an elimination grade by grade of those who seem unfit to render the best service in the next grade.

The process of elimination of the least fit should be conducted in a manner that would render it practically impossible to apply political or social pressure on behalf of any candidate, so that each man may be judged purely on his own…

Pressure for the promotion of civil officials for political reasons is bad enough, but it is tenfold worse where applied on behalf of officers of the Army or Navy.

Every promotion and every detail under the War Department must be made solely with regard to the good of the service and to the capacity and merit of the man himself.

No pressure, political, social, or personal, of any kind, will be permitted to exercise the least effect in any question of promotion or detail; and if there is reason to believe that such pressure is exercised at the instigation of the…

In our Army we cannot afford to have rewards or duties distributed save on the simple ground that those who by their own merits are entitled to the rewards get them, and that those who are peculiarly fit to do the duties are chosen to…

In time of need no amount of individual excellence would avail against the paralysis which would follow inability to work as a coherent whole, under skillful and daring leadership.

They should be so treated as to enable them to reach the highest point of efficiency, so that they may be able to respond instantly to any demand made upon them to sustain the interests of the Nation and the honor of the flag.

The individual American enlisted man is probably on the whole a more formidable fighting man than the regular of any other army.

Every consideration should be shown him, and in return the highest standard of usefulness should be exacted from him.

It is well worth while for the Congress to consider whether the pay of enlisted men upon second and subsequent enlistments should not be increased to correspond with the increased value of the veteran soldier.

It would be difficult to overestimate the improvement in the efficiency of our Army which these three reforms are making, and have in part already effected.