Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman are the four largest Western aerospace manufacturers that make complete military aircraft, although France's Dassault and the UK's BAE Systems are ...

Military aircraft have never been cheap, but the top tier exists in a class of its own. Stealth technology, exotic materials, mission-critical avionics, and decades of R&D have pushed the price of ...

The United States military has been flying all manner of aircraft for more than a century. Every few years, something new and exciting takes to the sky. Still, while there are plenty of new models of ...

The continent of Europe has created some of the most capable military aircraft in history, indeed the first combat action by an aeroplane was in Italian service. In the First World War, all of the ...

Surface-to-air missiles invalidated speed and altitude as reliable survivability strategies faster than planners anticipated. Interceptor missions vanished as strategic threats shifted from bombers to ...

Suggested Citation: "A Historical Perspective on the U.S. Defense Industrial Base." National Research Council. 1999. Defense Manufacturing in 2010 and Beyond: Meeting the Changing Needs of National ...