My longtime friend Jason Mojica (Director of Christmas in Darfur) has been working with Vice Magazine on their video series “Guide to Everything.” Together, they recently checked out the world’s largest trade show for selling military-grade weapons. You know how video game people flock to e3 to find out how bad ass and realistic the new ‘Call of Duty’ is going to be a year before it’s released? That’s like this, but for bombs that really explode, and really kill people. He writes:
“We all know that the international arms trade exists. We know that people
manufacture, buy, and sell military-grade weapons with the blessing of our
respective governments. But until you’ve seen the eerily cordial nature of
an arms fair up close, you’ll never understand just how far removed from the
reality of war the industry is. In this segment Vice magazine’s founder Shane Smith heads to SOFEX (Special
Operations Forces Expo) in Jordan, where you could mistake the mustachioed
men nibbling on teacakes for a group of anesthesiologists at a medical
conference… if their chests weren’t covered in medals and they weren’t
debating which weapons system to spend their “foreign aid” checks on.”
Good news is the episode is online. Bad news is it’s flash-only and not embeddable, so you’ll have to go to MTV.com to watch it. But you really should, at least the first segment about SOFEX because it’s totally nuts and more people need to know how this business works. Also, if you are the kind of dude who wants to pimp out your Jeep with some missile this is relevant to your interests.
