In 1978 Vernon W. Ruttan and his co-author Uri Ben-Zion published an econometric model exploring the relationship between aggregate demand changes and the rate of technical change. Their conclusion: “We show that the value of input-saving technical change is greater in periods of greater demand than in periods of stable or falling demand” (Hans P. Binswanger, Vernon W. Ruttan, and others. Induced Innovation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978: 262). That conclusion would seem to forecast the answer to the question posed in the title of this volume. Unless one is prepared to contend that war is the only source of aggregate demand expansion, the answer must be a negative. However, the question, while not quite a “throw away line” because the last chapter of the book does address it, is not the focus of the book. The subtitle more accurately describes the content as does Ruttan's statement that the book is an attempt “to assess the significance of military [and defense-related] procurement on the development of commercial technology” (p. 170).

Ruttan observes that “we do not yet have, and perhaps cannot have, a body of rigorous econometric evidence against which to evaluate the economic impact of defense and defense-related R&D and procurement” (p. 170). Thus the methodology that he opts for is a “careful narrative analysis of individual cases” (p. 170). The cases chosen are those in which known military demands played a role. Technologies with minimal or no involvement with military procurement are cases aside. One might list electricity, the internal combustion engine, the radio, and, more recently, biotechnology and medical imaging. The cases are six general-purpose technologies: interchangeable parts and mass production, military and commercial aircraft, nuclear energy and electric power, computers and semi-conductors, the Internet, and the space industries. After an introductory chapter that reviews theories on the rate and direction of technical change—induced technical change, evolutionary theory, path dependence, and radical technology shifts derived from “presumptive anomalies” in an existing technology—the discussion turns to the case studies. Each of the technologies is surveyed in detail, largely from secondary sources, but with explicit time lines of the development of the technology and its sources in military R&D procurement. The twentieth-century technologies are detailed by source agencies in funding as well as by steps in a given technology's development. Curiously, the surveys are largely “dimensionless” in economic terms. Occasional, general references to the magnitudes of military expenditures relative to civilian are given, e.g., “The military and space programs continued to account for at least two thirds of R&D directed to increasing aircraft performance until at least the early 1980s” (p. 62). However no such estimates are offered consistently for the twentieth-century cases discussed nor are military procurement expenditures given at any point for any of the technologies. The bypassing of data for both R&D and for military procurement is surprising given that Ruttan's earlier work, Technology, Growth, and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), does include data for 1960 to 1999 on federal research and development expenditures broken down in part by function—defense, space, atomic science—as well as the federal R&D expenditures on civilian technologies (ibid., p. 548). Data such as these, when set against private-sector R&D expenditures, might well have provided a relative, quantitative assessment of the significance of military-based R&D for the technologies reviewed. The size of the military market relevant for the technologies discussed also remains an open question. Military procurement expenditures do not appear in Ruttan's earlier work nor do they here, though such figures are (presumably) accessible and might be allocated, at least broadly, to the technologies at issue. The absence of any quantitative measures necessarily leaves Ruttan with judgment conclusions such as: “In the case of the general-purpose technologies that emerged as important sources of growth in U.S. economy during the last half of the twentieth century, it was primarily military and defense-related demand that drove these emerging technologies rapidly down their learning curves” (p. 166).

Why might the federal government in its military R&D and expenditure role be a more effective technology developer than the private sector? Ruttan's survey of the six cases suggests two answers. The first is that the federal government is a capital supplier par excellence, offering resources far beyond what the private sector might assemble. Witness the initial capital expenditures for both nuclear and space technology development. Secondly, the government supplies “patient capital” with a ten or 20 year time horizon that can allow technologies to mature. Witness earth-observing, navigational, and communications satellites—though Ruttan extends the point considerably: “Each of the general-purpose technologies that I have reviewed have required several decades of public support, primarily in the form of military R&D and defense or defense-related procurement to reach the threshold of commercial viability” (p. 177).

The “narrative analysis” of the book succeeds largely as narrative—as an institutional history of technology development in selected fields where military R&D and expenditures played a role. As analysis, there is less to point to, for, without the basic data on military R&D and procurement expenditures by technology forms, little analysis can result. Speculative judgments are possible however, and Ruttan concludes with one, addressed to a variant of the book's title, that warrants quotation: “Will it take a major war or threat of war to induce the mobilization of the scientific, technical, and financial resources necessary to develop major new general-purpose technologies? My answer to this question, based on historical experience, is that it may” (p. 185).