Not necessarily “fetishizing,” but I hear some strange radio ads for military hardware around Washington, D.C. And by “strange” I mean that the ads exist at all. Given that one KC-45 would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, exactly who’s going to buy one? Would that person have been completely ignorant about the KC-45 if it weren’t for the radio ad? More likely, these ads are targeted at purchasing officials, or possibly legislators, but that’s still a very narrow target for a radio ad. Anything to get “KC-45” repeating in the dozen or so relevant brains, I guess. (And it isn’t just radio – I’ve seen these ads in Metro stations. They seem to be in stations closer to the Pentagon, but still, the Pentagon has to go thru procurement etc.)
Thinking back, I can vaguely remember “Peace through Strength” advertisements in the DFW area, where Lockheed and LTV were big employers at the time. Around the same time as… Top Gun. (EDIT: And Iron Eagle, which I remember was out within a few weeks of the air raid on Libya.)
