Military–entertainment complex
Director Elmer Davis stated "The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people's minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized".
[5] In 1953 US President Dwight D. Eisenhower declared "The hand of government must be carefully concealed, and, in some cases I should say, wholly eliminated" and that "a great deal of this particular type of thing would be done through arrangements with all sorts of privately operated enterprises in the field of entertainment, dramatics, music, and so on and so on.
From 1942 to 1945, the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures reviewed 1,652 film scripts and revised or discarded any that portrayed the United States in a negative light, including material that made Americans seem "oblivious to the war or anti-war."
[11] The 1986 film Top Gun, produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer at Paramount Pictures, and with DoD assistance, aimed at rebranding the U.S. Navy's image in the post-Vietnam War era.
[12][13] By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, Hollywood producers were stressing script writers to create military-related plots to gain production power from the U.S.
[23] In early 2019, the U.S. Army released a promotional military hip hop video, "Giving All I Got", with the explicit intent to get the attention of the younger crowd.
[27] During the 1980s, Academic and military researchers led the development of distributed interactive simulations (DIS) that enable the creation of real-time, virtual theaters of war.
They belong to a TV and technology generation... [so] how is it that our soldiers are still sitting in classrooms, still listening to lectures, still depending on books and other paper reading materials, when possibly new and better methods have been available for many years?
"[27] The Air Force captain Jack A. Thorpe developed SIMNET with DARPA, a real-time distributed networking to modernize virtual simulation capacities and enable soldiers to experience war situation in times of peace.
[27] After the first-person-shooter hit Doom came out in 1993, the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Office (MCMSO) released the online Personal Computer Based Wargames Catalog where Army personnel published detailed reviews of the video games they investigated.
[30] The U.S. military has provided $53 million in funding to professional sports organizations in exchange for pro-military messaging, such as a "salute" to active duty soldiers and war veterans.
