To start, a lot of the innovations that are being used in commercial airliners, anything from jet engines to composite materials to computers and other things, very often, it's by the military. The military pays for it. If you look, for example, at the engines of the Challenger and the original regional jet, the basic engine was developed for military programs. So a lot of the R and D was paid for by the military; there was a great deal of piggybacking.
Composite materials, for example, my understanding is that there are certain types of alloy, like the aluminum lithium alloy that's being used by Bombardier on the CSeries, the pioneers as far as that was concerned were the military. The military was looking at ways to reduce weight for combat aircraft, so they did a lot of research, paid companies to develop special alloys that eventually became cheap enough and reliable enough to become usable by civilian operators, because you have to open panels...the military have different requirements.
It's not everything, but a lot of things come from the military. It's not like the automobile industry. There's a lot more involvement of the military, at least on the research and development of new products, new ideas like jet engines, radar, stealth—no not stealth technology—composite materials, and afterwards they become commercially available because the prices go down low enough that they can be produced for airliners. The military tend to be more interested in performance than penny-pinching.