2026 年 23 巻 p. 49-68
This paper analyzes the transformation of the U.S. wartime economy during World War II and its formative role in establishing the postwar corporate system and the Pax Americana regime. It sheds light on one of the major pillars of the postwar U.S. corporate system, the American-style mass production system, by showing how wartime production control during World War II directly shaped the institutional foundations of the postwar American-style mass-production system. The wartime production control—particularly the Production Requirements Plan (PRP), the Controlled Materials Plan (CMP), and the Components Scheduling Plan (CSP)—institutionalized nationwide coordination among military demand, industrial supply, and administrative management. In particular, the CMP vertically integrated industrial coordination, aligning critical material flows of steel, copper, and aluminum across firms and sectors. It extended American-style mass production techniques, which operated on the basis of the Bill of Materials and the Order Board system, to the entire wartime economy, creating a vertically integrated framework for synchronizing materials, balancing aggregate demand and supply, and reinforcing large corporations’ dominance. Overall, the wartime experience of these production controls transformed ad hoc mass production into an integrated managerial regime grounded in data reporting, forecasting, and synchronization.
The paper also traces the postwar diffusion of these control systems into the Defense Production Act (1950), Material Requirements Planning (MRP), and modern global supply-chain management (GSCM). The wartime rationality of forecasting, allocation, and synchronization evolved into the managerial and informational architecture of global production. Thus, wartime mobilization was not an exceptional episode, but a key stage in the institutional evolution of modern capitalism and the foundations of the enduring economic order of the Pax Americana regime, even in the era of globalization.
