Saturday, December 31, 2016

"War Dogs" Was Based on a True Story

Cadillac Man recommended "War Dogs" and likely part of his interest is because it was based on actual history rather than being entirely a Hollywood fiction.  The play is around two young Jewish boys one of whom is a regular kid and the other is a wise guy.  They had been best friends in school but had drifted apart for regular things and wise guy things.

When the wise guy returned, he introduced the regular kid to arms trafficking and from that you know the outcome is inevitable; they're going to get busted eventually.  The story in between is something of a Hollywood documentary of their descent into progressively more nefarious ways as they landed larger and larger Pentagon orders.

Note:  much of the movie is, in fact, fiction and Hollywood fluff but the foundation of the story about the pair as arms merchants appears to be true.


The story reminded me of "Blow" with Johnny Depp playing the life of George Jung, one of the biggest coke dealers of the 70s / 80s.  He was living so large but was finally busted hard and his life disintegrated.  He was in the penitentiary until 2014 but he was back in the slammer in 2016 for a parole violation which was minor (i.e. he went to San Diego for four hours for a speaking gig but did not have permission of his parole officer).  That strikes as extremely harsh relative to the transgression but so it goes.


The young War Dogs go off on some wild rides during the course of the movie and eventually they get busted hard.  The wise guy gets four years and the regular kid gets house arrest for nine months.

The ending is soft since the Really Big Trafficker shows his gratitude for staying silent about him and gives the Regular Kid maybe a million dollars, a whole lot of money.  Presumably the Regular Kid lived happily ever after since he's the one married to Ana de Armas and leaving her for jail would be about as bleak as life can get.


Have fun in jail, Mister Big.


Cadillac Man was likely recommending the movie for the depiction of the wildly corrupt process of Pentagon procurement.  The Wise Guy and the Regular Kid showed even kids can play it and make enormous sums of money.  We can probably surmise the Pentagon has done nothing about that since the movie was released.  That was only in 2016 but the Pentagon moves so slowly it probably doesn't make any difference.

That the Pentagon does business with private arms traffickers is just about as scandalous as it's possible to get with so-called defense procurement.  There's no editorial to write when they're actively sustaining one of the most evil businesses in the world.

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