Mad Men: Selling war where it counts, in DC metros and buses

Enjoy our new column by the Democratizing Foreign Policy team exposing stealth corruption infecting our system — in plain sight.

Whether you realize it or not, when you enter D.C. you are effectively taking a swan dive head-first into a pool filled with military industrial complex (MIC) marketing.

If you fly into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, as I did on a recent trip, the MIC immersion actually starts before the plane even lands. While many of my fellow passengers were captivated by the sight of our nation’s historic monuments, I was staring out the other side of the plane at the offices of our nation’s monumental contractors: there’s the gleaming new Boeing defense headquarters in Arlington nestled next door to the offices of L3 Harris, with the bright lights of the giant Lockheed Martin office building right down the street.

All of which are just a short walk or metro ride from the Pentagon, which doled out more than $100 billion taxpayer dollars to these three companies last year, alone.

The city of Arlington’s website doesn’t mince words about why these companies, and nearly every top Pentagon contractor, has offices in the city, noting that the Pentagon is, “the largest buyer of aerospace and defense goods and services in the world.” The journey in and out of Reagan National makes it abundantly clear these contractors aren’t the least bit bashful about trying to get their share of the more than $400 billion in contracts the Pentagon inks every year.

Leaving the airport I walked past ads for other Pentagon contractors and noticed that an in-airport playground that my kids have cavorted upon is sponsored by Boeing, whose weaponry has allegedly been used in numerous attacks that have killed children. And that’s an important distinction: these aren’t ads from companies that sell car insurance or beer, these are ads from companies that literally profit from war — and the threat of war — and get hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year to do it.

Moreover, these are ads designed to persuade not you the taxpayer but policymakers in Washington, to fund contractor x, y or z’s special program. Sometimes to get there they have to engage in threat inflation or make patriotic appeals, but it’s all lobbying by another name.

Meanwhile, my journey was just beginning. When I made it to the metro the train I needed to get into the city came rolling in completely covered in a vibrant purple and bearing the slogans and logo of a large and still growing Pentagon contractor, Leidos, which reported more than $2 billion in defense revenue in 2024. As I stared out the window of the Barney-colored train we rode past metro stations — including at Crystal City and the Pentagon itself —that were filled with ads from Pentagon contractors.

Leidos advertisement on side of a Washington DC Metro car (Brett Heinz)

Most D.C. denizens tune all of this out, as I certainly did in the 10 years that I lived in the District. You take it for granted that you’re going to see a lot of ads from a lot of companies that want a lot of money from the U.S. government. You put up blinders to it all. But the sheer volume of Pentagon contractor ads has seemed inordinately high on all my recent trips to D.C., so I wanted to get a sense of whether my blinders had just worn out, or if there really was a lot more contractor advertising going on.

So I contacted my former colleague Brett Heinz, who has done one of the only systematic analyses of Pentagon contractor ads in the D.C. metro system that I’m aware of — he spent dozens of hours riding the metro just to look at ads so, yes, he might be a masochist, but he’s highly knowledgeable about this topic.

“Oh, it’s gotten so much worse,” Heinz, who now works at the American Friends Service Committee, explained in an interview. “The subway campaigns that I focused on are still common,” he added, pointing to recent ad campaigns by Amazon Web Services (AWS) — which were running as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was in town for President Trump’s inauguration — proclaiming to riders that “AWS is how taxpayer dollars go further” and “AWS is how intelligence stays a step ahead.”

“But contractors have also been trying new approaches,” Heinz added, pointing to the Anduril and L3 Harris billboard-sized ads that have been running on the side of D.C. buses for months.

L3 Harris advertisement on side of a Washington Metro bus (Brett Heinz)

For Anduril, these buses are part of an advertising blitz in the D.C. area that began last summer. In an homage to World War II posters, the company has an ad calling for “More, more, more, more production,” alongside a painting of what appear to be unmanned fighter jets. Another says, “We can’t win with blueprints,” which was inspired by a War Production Board poster circa 1942 or 1943, according to the company.

These and other posters have been featured in full-page newspaper ads, and are the centerpiece of Anduril’s ad push in the nation’s capital. They seemingly gift-wrap DC’s buses and, in August, the company actually took overall marketing at the Capitol South metro station (the closest metro station to House offices), ensuring Congressional staff and members of Congress not enjoying the August recess got a first hand look at these posters and a large banner that read simply, “Rebuild the arsenal.”

Anduril advertisement on the side of a Washington Metro bus (Brett Heinz)

Anduril did not respond to a request for comment about the advertising campaign.

This advertising does not come cheap. While Pentagon contractors are tight-lipped about their advertising spending, we obtained invoices from Outfront Media — which runs the advertising campaigns on the D.C. metro and buses — via a “Public Access to Records” request with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (WMATA).

One invoice was for Pratt & Whitney — which, amongst other things, makes jet engines for a number of military aircraft — showing the company paid $80,000 for just two “liveboards” to run in the metro for less than four months. Another memo from Outfront that Responsible Statecraft obtained showed these “station domination” takeovers in a metro station can cost more than $100,000 for just a single month of ads in a single station.

As pricey as that might be, it’s an easily justifiable expense for Pentagon contractors. “The returns on investment here are massive: if a contractor's ad campaign has even a marginal effect in securing one single Pentagon contract, the company will make their money back several times over,” Heinz explained.

To that point, just since the Anduril ads began running in the greater D.C. area the company has been awarded more than $1 billion in a series of contracts from the Pentagon.

While the ad campaigns' direct impact on any of these deals would be hard to prove, there’s no question that ad campaigns by Anduril and other Pentagon contractors get the attention of D.C. decision makers. That’s exactly the point. According to Outfront, “transit advertising makes you a part of consumers’ day.” In the greater D.C. area those “consumers” can be Pentagon acquisition officials, members of Congress, and their staff that help determine how much taxpayer money the Pentagon spends, and even which companies — like Anduril — get it.

These ads, then, are better seen as lobbying by other means. And, while it’s technically illegal for contractors to use Congressionally appropriated funds “for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency,” transit ads have not been considered as falling under this limitation. And last May, a D.C. judge ruled that a WMATA provision barring “advertisements that are intended to influence public policy,” was a violation of the First Amendment, which now gives government contractors and others free rein to run issue ads in the D.C. transit system.

In short, residents and visitors to our nation's capital will be forced to wade through an even wider and deeper swamp of Pentagon contractor marketing that was made possible, to some extent, by the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars the Pentagon doles out every year.