War Production Board to track quantity not rank

When the United States entered WWII, the government needed a way to make sure scarce raw materials — steel, copper, aluminum — went to war production ahead of civilian use, and it started with a priority-rating system: orders were stamped with a letter and number combination signaling how urgently they needed to be filled, with suppliers expected to work through their backlog in order of rating.

The War Production Board responded to the inevitable crowding at the top by adding new, higher ratings above the existing ones — AA above A, then AAA as an emergency rating, then a further series of AA-1 through AA-4 superratings — but each new tier filled up just as fast as the one below it. By late summer 1942, so many orders carried top ratings that copper allocations, for instance, ran out before reaching manufacturers with a rating as high as A-1-d, meaning a rating that should have signaled real urgency had become functionally worthless.

Replaced rankings with direct accounting: agencies submitted bills of materials, and the WPB allocated fixed quantities against known supply, balancing actual demand.

Under the Controlled Materials Plan, each claimant agency submitted its actual material requirements — not a request for a priority label but a bill of materials specifying exactly how much steel, cop

It only works if the government can actually see and track material flow through the full supply chain — a system that only allocates to prime contractors but loses visibility once material passes to

When a ranking or priority system is meant to allocate scarce resources but everyone learns to claim the top rank, ranking itself has failed — replace it with direct, quantity-based allocation tracked

The Controlled Materials Plan replaced competing priority claims with direct, accountable allocation of the actual scarce materials, tracked from claimant agencies through prime contractors down to subcontractors and suppliers, with accounting rules ensuring no agency could draw more than its allotment. By the end of 1943, the plan was widely regarded as a workable system that had resolved most of the materials-allocation problems the priority system's collapse had created.