ustry.

In the 1950s, for instance, Boeing could make use of

government-owned B-52 construction facilities to produce its B-707
model, providing the basis of its market dominance in large civilian
aircraft. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(N.A.S.A.) has often played a role comparable to the Pentagon. . .
. [G]overnment policies, in particular defence programmes, have
been an overwhelming force in shaping the strategies and
competitiveness of the world's largest firms. Even in 1994, without
any major actual or imminent wars, ten to fourteen firms ranked in
the 1993 Fortune 100 still [conducted] at least 10 per cent of their
business in closed defence markets.
David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial
Automation, New York: Knopf, 1984. An excerpt (pp. 5, 7-8):
[B]etween 1945 and 1968, the Department of Defense industrial
system had supplied $44 billion of goods and services, exceeding
the combined net sales of General Motors, General Electric, Du
Pont, and U.S. Steel. . . . By 1964, 90 percent of the research and
development for the aircraft industry was being underwritten by the
government, particularly the Air Force. . . . In 1964, two-thirds of
the research and development costs in the electrical equipment
industry (e.g., those of G.E., Westinghouse, R.C.A., Raytheon,
A.T.&T., Philco, I.B.M., Sperry Rand) were still paid for by the
government.
On the important government-funding organization DARPA (the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), see for example,
Elizabeth Corcoran, "Computing's controversial patron," Science, April
2, 1993, p. 20. An excerpt:
Lean by Washington standards, the 100-person corps [of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)] spurs
researchers at universities and private companies to build the stuff
of future defense technologies by handing out research grants -- a
total of $1.5 billion in fiscal 1992 and more this year. Among their
achievements, DARPA managers can count such key technologies
as high-speed networking, advances in integrated circuits, and the
emergence of massively parallel supercomputers. . . .
That track record has encouraged the new administration to
drop the "Defense" from DARPA's name, renaming it ARPA and
anointing it a lead agency in a new effort to help fledgling
technologies gain a hold in commercial markets. But this role for
DARPA isn't altogether new: Throughout the Reagan and much of
the Bush Administrations, Congress pumped hundreds of millions of
dollars into DARPA, enabling the agency to work hand in hand with
industry on technologies that would be critical not just to defense
but to U.S. competitiveness in civilian markets as well.
Andrew Pollack, "America's Answer to Japan's MITI," New York Times,
March 5, 1989