Boeing Boeing : la dualité civil-militaire source d’un rebond stratégique dans l’ère post-guerre froide

With the end of the Cold War, U.S. defence systems integrators have refocused on the core of their business, military or governmental. Boeing has been the only integrator that has maintained a dual civil-military business and that has even managed to build on this duality. The article uses the question of duality to observe the evolution of the firm’s capability, through the links that have been woven and tested between the different activities since the end of the Cold War. After an analepsis that examines the arbitrage between civil and military activities before the 1990s, the article studies the strategic decisions and discourses that have since punctuated the history of the firm. The main developments are related to the 777, the merger with McDonnell Douglas, the development of space-based services and innovative military contracts for network-centric systems. Boeing has considered and reconsidered what its capability is by exploiting on the links between civil and military activities in several ways. It has benefited both from the lack of synchronicity of the two business cycles and from the similarity of the technologies and large systems integration used in each.