The Pentagon clearly is watching a lot of Netflix. First, they got their backs up over Boots, now they have taken aim at A House Of Dynamite.
A House Of Dynamite arrived on the streamer over the weekend, telling the story of a rogue nuclear attack on the USA and showing several different pints of view of the scramble to deal with it.
In one scene, in a section titled Hitting A Bullet With A Bullet, an attempt is made to bring down the incoming ICBM with ground based interceptor missiles.
The movie states that the effective hit rate is just north of 50%. This is what has got the Pentagon so uppity.
Bloomberg (via Deadline) is reporting that, following the release of the movie on Netflix, an internal memo was issued by the Missile Defense Agency on October 16th to “address false assumptions, provide correct facts and a better understanding” of the capability of the system.
The memo says the multibillion-dollar system actually has “displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
All nations exaggerate the capability of their weapons and defences to obscure the truth and give their would be enemies pause.
Back in the late 1990s several NATO allies were rumored to have managed to detect B2 stealth bombers on their various air defence radars during exercises, leading to some frantic denials.
In this vein, screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, a former journalist, said he will “respectfully disagree” with the Pentagon’s assessment and added:
“I welcome the conversation. I’m so glad the Pentagon watched, or is watching, and is paying attention to it, because this is exactly the conversation we want to have.”
The movie had multiple tech advisers who worked at the Pentagon in the past, but Bigelow stated she deliberately kept the Pentagon outside the production so they weren’t pressured into presenting an approved narrative.
A House of Dynamite is now available on Netflix, and we reviewed it yesterday.
