It's Militarment! Hollywood Succumbs to the Pentagon's Borg

Discount sales on living room screens

A series of images and stories in front of an American audience will displace any kind of calculation about taxpayer expense, Stahl said when asked about the burden borne by the average American taxpayer when a weapons system is loaned to a studio. He added that the question of cost is drowned out by […] emotional connections. And the entertainment industry is there to foster those emotional connections.

In the film, Stahl explains that through the OWI's successor, the Entertainment Liaison Office, the Defense Department conditions the loan of weapons systems on full access to the studios' script for a new film. Once the script is reviewed and returned with notes, script changes, or even general plot changes, the studio can either accept the changes in their entirety or lose access to the military's toys. This biased relationship can lead to blatant propaganda.

Halfway through Theaters of War, viewers see what appears to be an in-film commercial. In The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise, released in 2017, rapper and actor Ludacris bed Ludacris released a 30-word scene that appears to be an ad promoting Textron Systems' Ripsaw remote-controlled tank. It turns out that Ludacris' lines were not written by a scriptwriter, but by the Entertainment Liaison Office. The scene has indeed become a must-see ad, brought to the viewer by the U.S. Army.

Similar covert marketing scenes can be seen in hundreds of blockbuster films, from the Transformers franchise, which features Starscream as an F-22 fighter jet, to the much-vaunted Marvel films. While audiences are being subjected to obvious sales pitches, in some cases the Pentagon is also promoting faulty and useless products.

Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet has been judge the heavyweight champion of poorly designed futuristic weapons, costing American taxpayers more than $2 trillion. Yet the History Channels' 2011 documentary Secret Access: Superpower paints a different picture. The short series presents the F-35 as the only means of maintaining America's militaristic dominance, and in Man of Steel, Superman himself flies alongside a fleet of F-35s in his battle against the ruthless Kryptonians. According to Stahl, this was all made possible by the Entertainment Liaison Office.

Tom Secker, the investigative journalist labeled a vexatious requester by the Pentagon for his relentless barrage of FOIA requests, shared the previously unpublished information Production assistance contract For Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning.

In addition to allowing the Mission Impossible team to film at U.S. military bases in the United Arab Emirates, the contract calls for the Department of Defense to loan the production team a Boeing-made V-22 Osprey for use in at least two scenes in which the aircraft would be filmed both internally and externally.

The osprey, known as the widow makeris a $120 billion a disaster that is just one accident away from being put out of service, since it has already caused the death of 62 soldiers.

According to Stahl, these scenes are intentionally designed to create an emotional connection between the viewer and the weapons systems. A connection that could soften the blow in a near-future scenario in which the viewer might realize just how powerful the F-35, Osprey, and other systems like the LCS Program This serves to normalize these huge expenses, he added.

Creating scenes like these means, Alford says, that they [the Pentagon] are able to show how sexy, wonderful, useful and targeted their new products are. The public, in turn, will be less likely to see the messy, nasty and cruel side of the industry.

Promote, whitewash and justify commitments

While the Pentagon had once explained its stated goals for its involvement in the entertainment industry as a directive to promote authenticity in the depiction of military operations and to maintain an accepted level of dignity in the portrayal of military personnel, those guidelines changed in 1988. new goals “to collaborate to promote public understanding of the U.S. Armed Forces and the DoD, improve Armed Forces recruiting and retention programs, and adherence to and promotion of U.S. government policy.”

One of the most disturbing scenes in Theaters of War comes from the 2017 film “The Long Road Home.” In one, a military colonel claims that the 2004 Sadr City operation, which killed 22 servicemen and 940 Iraqis, was necessary to free two million Iraqis from the oppression of a dictator and give them a “better future.”

This assertion ignores the series of false narratives like the existence of weapons of mass destruction or Iraq's supposed ties to al-Qaeda that brought American troops to Iraqi soil in the first place, nor does it examine whether the United States had an obligation to protect populations from the world's dictators.

This scene and others like it have an implicit purpose, Alford says: to create a little more confidence in the effectiveness of military engagements. Whether it’s Ben Afleck’s Argo whitewashing the CIA’s role in the ouster of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, Black Hawk Down painting a veneer of courage over the disastrous debacle in Somalia, or 1986’s Top Gun cleaning up the military’s image after two decades of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, these covert militancy campaigns have largely worked.

More recently, the second season of Jack Ryan features The Office’s lovable Jim working with the CIA to overthrow a nuclear-armed Venezuelan dictator in hopes of installing a magnanimous liberal populist. The season aired around the same time Washington was marching Juan Guaido as the new leader of Venezuela.

The Costs of the Military Entertainment Industry

In giving an overall diagnosis of the problem, Stahl mentioned that the problem lies in the perceived interests of the American people, adding that while they are focused on government handouts and welfare programs, they are oblivious to the costs of our militaristic engagement with the world, a cost that was succinctly summarized at the end of the documentary as reaching $8 trillion just in the period following September 11.

With a sixth failed audita military budget rapidly approaching $1 trillion and a new nuclear weapon ICBM system In the books, the influence of the military industry is undeniably sinister and more present than ever.

Still, Theaters of War offers a glimmer of hope: transparency. Stahl, Alford, Secker, and others involved in the film recommend that every film or show the Pentagon works with should have a prominent disclaimer at the beginning, not buried in the credits, indicating that the Defense Department, the CIA, or some other government agency was involved in the production. Then viewers will know that what they are about to see is, at least in part, a propaganda idea, as Elmer Davis put it.