Synopsis
The Pentagon Wars (1998) is an HBO satire you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Richard Benjamin. The subject is one of the pricier acquisition disasters in US military history: seventeen years and roughly fourteen billion dollars spent developing the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a machine that kept failing its own tests.
Air Force Colonel Burton (Cary Elwes) is assigned to evaluate the Bradley and identifies the problem quickly. General Partridge (Kelsey Grammer) identified it long before that — which is why Burton now finds himself buried in irrelevant paperwork, threatened with reassignment to Alaska, and running into procedural walls at every turn. Viola Davis, Richard Schiff and John C. McGinley round out a cast that plays everything with a straight face, which is the right call.
Benjamin based the script on Colonel James Burton's firsthand account of his Pentagon years, and the moments closest to the truth tend to be the funniest. The machine gets built anyway. Stream The Pentagon Wars (1998) on iFILM.
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