onversion of Defense Industry

The changing security environment and general economic decline which precipitated the end of the Cold War have had tremendous implications for the nature and scale of defense production worldwide.

Reductions in military expenditures beginning in the mid-1980s as a result of budgetary pressures and a reduction in East-West tensions have led not only to a significant decline in the global trade in conventional weapons and domestic procurement, with concomitant reductions in defense industrial employment, but also in many cases to a shrinkage in the overall size of the industry - through mergers and acquisitions, shut-downs, and diversification - and a reevaluation of its very nature and relation to commercial production.

Employment in defense-related industry has declined from a 1987 high of 17.3 million to less than 11 million at present, with further redundancies only a matter of time.

This contraction in the market for military hardware and the resulting redundancies in defense-related employment have led to a variety of responses on the part of governments, firms and individual workers, in an effort to effectively redeploy resources to new and productive ends. This process, whether termed 'conversion,' 'diversification,' or 'industrial restructuring,' has met with mixed results. The imperative for conversion - those underlying issues which made its consideration relevant immediately following the end of the Cold War - remains untouched.