The Royal Navy's production of guns, blocks, tackle, and rope during the Napoleonic period provides an earlier example of industrial scale supporting operations. World War I extended mass production across the fighting force at a much larger level. John Bull cites estimates of roughly 250 million German shells and about 700 to 900 million shells overall, treating these as estimates of scale. Producing ammunition did not automatically give commanders the information needed to use it well. Slow reporting and limited analytical capacity constrained decisions about where to concentrate fire and how to respond to results. Much wartime adaptation involved building the command and information arrangements required to manage that output.
Notable Point · 1:46:14-1:49:15
Shell production expanded faster than command's information systems
Manufacturing hundreds of millions of shells created demands for information and coordination as well as factories.