The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don’t exist. Sometimes, the Defense Department cooperates with Hollywood and provides advice; other times, it takes a pass, especially if the subject raises touchy issues. The Navy, for example, naturally didn’t want to help with Crimson Tide, deciding that the 1995 movie about a mutiny on a nuclear-missile submarine perhaps wasn’t in the best interest of the naval service.
Now the Pentagon is annoyed with the director Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, a sweaty thriller about civilian and military leaders trying to cope with a surprise missile launch against the United States. It’s not too much of a spoiler to note that in the early part of the movie, America launches GBIs, or ground-based interceptors, from Alaska—a system that really exists at Fort Greeley,
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