ABSTRACT
Superlatives apply to almost all aspects of the US aerospace industry. It is the dominant player in world aerospace, not so much in terms of output and employment tallies where it is rivalled by the USSR, but rather in respect of its role as technological powerhouse across the entire range of aircraft, missiles, spacecraft, aeroengines, systems and avionics. Moreover, as the quintessential technology-intensive industry, aerospace out-performs all other American manufacturing industries in the amount of resources it is prepared to devote to R & D. As Table 7 makes clear, not even the computer and associated electronics industry (subsumed under the banner of Electrical Machinery) attains the level set by aerospace, while such important industries as chemicals and motor vehicles have R&D spending levels significantly less than one-half of the level achieved by aerospace. The rising tempo of aerospace R&D spending in the 1980s is evident from Table 15. Boosted spending is chiefly attributable to the largesse of the federal government which, in any event, accounts for a much greater proportion of total aerospace R & D funding than the aerospace companies themselves. This renewed government interest is in marked contrast to the situation applying a decade ago. Indeed, a declining level of R & D spending in the early 1970s reflected the winding down both of the Vietnam War and the space programme with the resultant partial disengagement of the government (emulated by the companies) from defence and space-related research. Declining demand for defence products was also responsible, in the main, for the drastic cutback in aerospace employment in the 1970s after it had reached a brief zenith of 1.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War (Table 16). Since 1979 the industry has maintained a workforce in excess of one million, vying with the automotive industry as the leading US manufacturing employer. In the mid-1980s the workforce exceeded 1.2 million, that is, the industry employed over six per cent of all US manufacturing workers.
