Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama, starting in January 2007, spent more than a year fighting for their political parties' nomination for President of the United States. For all their rhetoric about everything from taxes to trade during those many months, however, they had very little to say about aviation, aerospace and national security - the unpopular war in Iraq notwithstanding.

That probably should come as no surprise; specifics on complex issues aren't exactly a staple of presidential campaigns. As expected, both men kept a laser focus on connecting with voters on broad concepts that would resonate with the largest number of people: affordable health care, greater opportunity for all Americans and national unity.

All the same, there are many aviation, aerospace and defense policy issues that demand urgent attention. Every one of them affect millions of livelihoods in a struggling domestic economy, and some have global implications. We're talking here about daunting challenges that will shape, to one degree or another, the course of human progress around the world, not just the U.S. Three examples are America's role in future space exploration, defense modernization and a crumbling civil aviation infrastructure. These and related conundrums, exacerbated by a colossal national debt and a war on two fronts, will weigh on the next President from his first day in the Oval Office.

Aviation Week & Space Technology has given considerable thought to the implications of a McCain or Obama administration. Out of those concerns came the comprehensive examination that follows on pages 48-58. It was produced by a team of Aviation Week journalists who engaged both camps, talked with advisers and plumbed public records to develop as complete a picture as possible of how aviation, aerospace and defense might fare under the next President, regardless of who's elected.

Ironically, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her team apparently did give detailed thought to policy positions on many of these areas. She produced a position paper that framed her thoughts on subjects that McCain and Obama have either skirted or ignored during 16 months of campaigning - even though one or the other, as President, will play a pivotal role in decisions that will have far-reaching consequences.

To a large extent, the implications of a McCain or Obama presidency will be defined as much by the economic and security backdrop as the election itself.

Think about it in an historical context and consider, for example, the mood of the country when John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. Against the backdrop of an intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, President Kennedy declared that the U.S. would put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade - and there followed an unprecedented surge in funding for civil and military space and a renewed focus on math and science education in U.S. schools.

In the period leading up to Ronald Reagan's defeat of President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the campaign and election played out against the backdrop of the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and a general foreboding that the U.S. military had become a hollow force in the aftermath of the nation's humiliating defeat in Vietnam. President Carter already had started rebuilding the military well before he was voted out of office and may well have continued on that course. But the newly elected Ronald Reagan accelerated the arms buildup, and out of his energetic attention to national security came, among other things, the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Another example is what happened following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. President George H. W. Bush already had started drawing down the defense budget against the backdrop of voters' expectations that the nation would realize a huge "peace dividend." With the election of President Bill Clinton, who had campaigned on a platform that included turning swords into plowshares, that drawdown was steeper than it might have been otherwise.

Out of that transition came, among other things, the U.S. defense industry's infamous "last supper" - a dinner meeting at the Pentagon in which the heads of America's largest defense contractors were told there would be insufficient work in the future to keep all of them in business - followed by the convulsive consolidation of military contractors for the remainder of the decade.

"In terms of the actual impact of new Presidents on the [defense] industry, the backdrop tends to be more of the determinant," observes Steve Grundeman, former deputy undersecretary of Defense for industrial affairs in the second Clinton administration and now vice president of aerospace and defense at CRA International, a Boston-based consulting firm. "In the upcoming election, the underlying national security situation will determine the level of defense spending in the next four years, though a McCain administration's priorities may be very different from those of an Obama presidency."

And therein lies the rub for military contractors of all sizes: the uncertainty that could bedevil long-range business planning. But if the past is prologue - again, looking at it in an historical context - it would seem likely that some major programs will get the ax. "The cancellation of the B-1 bomber, while a huge setback for the bomber community, set in motion the development of cruise missiles and unmanned systems," recalls former Aerospace Industries Assn. President and CEO John Douglass, who served in the Reagan White House and later was assistant secretary of the Navy.

The most vexing aviation and aerospace-related issues won't be limited to just national security, of course. The next president and his administration will be forced to address such fundamental questions as whether U.S. airlines should be re-regulated. McCain's and Obama's policy positions, and perhaps even some specifics, may become clearer in the glare of the national campaign leading up to the Nov. 4 election. Certainly in this turn-the-page election, there can be no such thing as too much insight into the candidates' positions on aviation, aerospace and defense issues, which go far beyond parochial or even U.S. interests.