Military Non-recurring engineering costs are big business. Boeing gets to cover most of it's with military contracts and then use spinoffs for commercial aircraft.
American aircraft manufacturers engineer down from military resources in commercial manufacturing. EU aircraft firms engineer up for the smaller pie military work, out of their commercial resources.
For an example, do you think that EU space agencies can compete with the space shuttle? Nope!!!!!! The EU could never mission profile a space shuttle like America's. Do you think that without a military component to the developmental side of the space shuttle it would ever have been pulled off? Nope.........
I used to do work at the NADC(naval air development center) Ninety percent of the engineers there are not government employees. They are there supporting Boeing projects, Grumman, McDD, Aliant Tech, EGG Rotron, Inland Motors, etc....All doing development work paid for by the DOD, yet produce intellectual results and design work which is later benefiting their commercial side of the business. Yes that's commerce, but it's entirely captive commerce at the direction of the DOD.
While I accept the definition you proffer as a better description, I still maintain that it is in no way a subsidy: Goods and services are contracted for, given, received and paid for. The fact that the profit may be reinvested in another line of business is neither here nor there for they are profits derived for commercial activity and as such there disposal is purely up to management and the stockho;lders of the firm reaping the profit. In any event it cannot be maintained that such arrangements are somehow equivalent to a direct subsidy such as the ones offered by EU member states to Airbus.
Even if one were to squint and imagine that the EU member states "contributions" to Airbus were somehow "investments" it still would stink of government subsidizing business for 1) the coercive measures of directly taking the tax monies of citizens and investing it, not on their behalf but on the behalf of the state, reeks wholly of theft, which indeed it is, 2) the citizen in no way get a "return" on this "investment" in any real sense of the world, nor in any real sense does "the state" as it just goes into the coffers of the instituions that actually print money, and 3) the relationship between state, "real" investors, management and company is at best one that could be described as "cartelism" and at worst could be call "fascism" (which is indeed what it actually is.)
But even if we turn a blind eye to all that, Airbus itself gets direct military contract from the EU (ie the new air tankers, that new military transport, coastal partol pplanes) and EADS get huge amounts of work from european defense and aerospace industry. There is also a great deal of tech transfer (and even personnel) between EADS and AIRBUS, and even a great fdeal of "secret" tech transfer between France's national research institutions to EADS. In fact, EADS has recieved large sums from NASA for various projects and is in the current group for the missile defense initiative. I do not know if you are aware of it but the EU has lead commercial space launches for several of the last few years. What make you position particularly odd is that much of the technological transfer came from the "generous" (some would say "treasonous") goings on over the International Space Station and other projects (just witness the Cassini probe) undertaken mostly during the Clinto years, tech transfer directly by the American taxpayer.
So one, it is a absurd thing to claim that because EADS and Airbus does less government business than Boeing that there is in fact some sort of "unfair" subsidies being tossed Boeing's way by the DOD - If EADS and Airbus do not like this they should go drum up more government business in the EU, not call the suceess of Boeing with our government "unfair." Two, it is an odd thing to say in the first place because it is quite true that EADS receives the same sort of "indirect subsidies" from the American tapayer!
It even gets stranger. The current Galileo GPS system, a system really meant to compete directly in a military sense is now to use research directly developed by Boeing in it in exchange for the "promise" that the EU (read France) will stick to certain frequency guidelines and usage policies. France did this so coercively and with such bellicosity that it really amount to a very protracted act of war against us. They have even brought the Chinese in on the deal.
So here we see an "indirect subsidy" to EADS not just from the US government but from EADS' competitors. There is little such reciprocal relationships between public moonies in the EU and Boeing. On top of it all France is direclty affecting our national security with our monies
The EU argument is fallacious, hypocritical, bootless and without merit on the face of it and just to pose it shows how morally depraved and intellectually bankrupt the French truly are.
But there are two final points:
The American taxpayer actually gets something out of the contracts with Boeing; they get national security. In a very real sense that the citizens of the EU do not recieve any collective return on their "investment" in Airbus. It is all about EU elites - again, mostly the French, try to somehow "humiliate" America.
The American citizen as every right to expect that their defense dollar go to American companies for reasons of but security and economics.
In essesense, to hit apon industries directly connected to defense is to willfuly obscure the issue (on france's part, not your's)
We could pick other industries where this pops up with the french (energy, agri-business, ship building) and there the matter would be even more obvious and the response from the French would be just the same lame, bald lies.
So I would say that my point still stands.