This entry is a subentry of Procurement.
The relationship between the U.S. aircraft industry and the military has always been close. Fixed‐wing piloted flight was technologically demanding and required large sums of capital. Early inventors turned to the military services for markets, and the U.S. Army Signal Corps ordered its first craft from the Wright brothers in 1908. Although American capabilities lagged behind those in Europe, the U.S. government spent $350 million during World War I to produce 14,000 military airplanes. It also created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to explore aircraft science and advise the military.
Military patronage produced an unusually cooperative structure in the early aircraft industry. The government engineered the formation of the Manufacturers Aircraft Association to moderate ferocious competition and avoid patent battles that might delay wartime production by pooling patents and sharing plane‐making methods. After World War I, orders collapsed by over 80 percent. The association successfully pressed for government sponsorship of airmail services and an infrastructure of airports, weather reporting, and flight control, as well as continued military contracts to develop new aircraft. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's call for 40,000 aircraft led to the expansion of small companies like Boeing, Douglas, North American, Consolidated (later General Dynamics), McDonnell, and Grumman by tenfold or more. Aircraft accounted for more than 12 percent of all U.S. wartime manufacturing output.
After World War II, when aircraft orders plunged from a peak of $16 billion to $1 billion, the aircraft industry campaigned vigorously with the newly independent U.S. Air Force for a public commitment to air defense systems, expansion of domestic and international air transport, and the preservation of a strong aircraft manufacturing industry. Close ties with military strategies were relied upon to help shape military markets and government notions of defense necessities. Some scholars have argued that this “technology push” contributed to the development of the arms race of the Cold War.
Contracts ballooned in the Cold War and were welcomed by economists advocating “military Keynesianism” to achieve full employment via public spending. Competition between the piloted bomber and the ballistic missile groups within the air force, and between army and navy bids for helicopters and their own fighter aircraft, resulted in the production of a broad array of aviation weapons systems, which kept most of the major aircraft companies in business. In 1958, NACA became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with huge additional projects for the industry. The size, speed, and aggressiveness of the industry's development led President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 to warn the nation about the dangers of a permanent “military industrial complex.”
The renamed “aerospace” industry has been favored by this de facto but unofficial industrial policy. The military acted as the underwriters of aerospace development after World War II, encouraging development of the jet engine and the communications satellite. In 1989, the Pentagon paid for 82 percent of the aerospace industry's research and development effort and purchased 65 percent of its output. As a result, aircraft remain the nation's strongest manufacturing export, and U.S. companies dominate the world market for commercial as well as military aircraft. Since the end of the Cold War, the industry has undergone deep retrenchment, consolidating into fewer and larger firms (Northrop‐Grumman, Lockheed‐Martin), and relying more heavily on arms exports.
[See also Industry and War.]
Bibliography
- John Rae, Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960, 1968.
- G. R. Simonson, ed., The History of the American Aircraft Industry: An Anthology, 1968.
- Martin van Creveld, Technology and War, 1989.
- Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt, 1992
