In the month and a half I spent in DC this autumn, advertisements for defense contractors proved unavoidable. Everywhere I looked in the capital, there were promises to make America’s globe-spanning killing machine more lethal. The city’s Metro is so saturated with these ads, you might think no business had ever considered selling any consumer products. There’s no respite to be found aboveground, either. Walking out of a movie theater at Gallery Place, I was confronted by a three-story, 180-degree poster campaign selling Palantir in its guise as a sponsor of the Army-Navy football game. In Washington, you rarely have a chance to stop thinking about war.

Some of the defense contractor ads are suspiciously oblique. One for an L3Harris missile system, featuring no images other than the company’s logo, a 2D rendering of a sphere made up of triangles, reads simply: “Red Wolf™ Ready Now.” Many more are distressingly direct. “Superhuman decisions win wars” reads the copy for the AI-powered workflow software company Onebrief. Some present a high-tech threat, which can act as a jump scare. In the Metro Center station, next to an ad thanking veterans, a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber hovers intimidatingly, its nose pointed directly at the passerby. It’s selling Applied Intuition, a self-driving vehicle start-up, which, in small font, pledges to deliver “air combat autonomy—and a decisive advantage—to the warfighter at Silicon Valley speed.”

I was surprised by the ads, but after years of living with them, longtime Washingtonians are not. “The fact that the average DC resident sees hundreds of these in any given year—to the point that they no longer think of them consciously—probably has an effect in numbing people towards a lot of the rhetoric and, particularly, the real violence of war, by making it seem like it’s just another regular industry,” Brett Heinz, a global-policy coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee who started tracking the ads in 2023, told me. “It has the effect of taking us off guard and making this seem like it’s a very normal, neutral choice that our politicians are making, rather than an active decision to invest in militarism and violence.”

One evening, on the way to trivia night at a bar in Arlington, which draws teams with names like “Houthi PC Small Group,” I missed my stop on the Metro, distracted by my phone. By sheer luck, I had to change trains at the epicenter of this plague of advertising. It was a long wait at the Pentagon station. Puttering around, I started to look up. Every inch of ad space had been bought by Seekr, which sells itself as “AI built for the battlefield” and promises to “weaponize your data.” Seekr’s ad campaign didn’t come cheap. “The Pentagon is the most expensive station to ‘dominate,’” Heinz wrote in his 2023 report. “Advertising to the 665,786 commuters estimated to visit the Pentagon station in a four week period costs $198,000 (about 30 cents per commuter), before fees.”

Does that investment pay off with the Pentagon higher-ups these ads target? “We definitely notice them,” said Andrew P. Hunter, who served as assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics under the Biden administration. “From time to time, someone will make a comment and say, ‘Wow, Company X bought it out—they sure have decorated every available surface.’” The ads aren’t aimed at rank-and-file acquisition officers, but at their bosses. “People in the acquisition world do a lot of market research,” Hunter said. “They’re very aware of what companies are in a space, who’s competing for a contract. They know that months or years ahead of the process really becoming more publicly known. I’ve always seen the advertising as more targeted at people outside the acquisition community who are requirements setters, or are more in the operational community or in the command structure. What they don’t want is a veto from those people.”

None of the defense contractors whose ads I spotted agreed to comment. Even the Foundation for American Innovation, a pro-defense tech think tank, put a little distance between itself and its advocacy for the defense industry’s ad campaigns. When I asked their spokesperson for thoughts, he shared a quote from a spokesperson for the Defense Analyses and Research Corporation, which he initially characterized as a DC think tank but then admitted was simply one of the foundation’s projects. “We need more ads that promote the defense industry in the DC Metro,” the quote reads. “As Secretary Hegseth has rightly observed, America is now on wartime footing and we should not forget it. The last thing we need is another ad shilling for some do-nothing NGO or some dumb book like If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about all those ads at the Pentagon station, so I went back looking to be sold on more weaponry. I figured there must be ads everywhere aboveground, too, but I was disappointed. Viewed from the sprawling parking lot outside the building, the advertising landscape was curiously barren; even the bus stops were unadorned. Here, in one of the few places in the city where constant thoughts of war are appropriate, the ads, I learned, are forbidden by policy. The Pentagon knows there’s something wrong with having defense contractor advertising displayed too close to home base. Just down the Metro escalator seems far enough, though. “Commercial advertising is not permitted on the Pentagon Reservation, except during official Department of War–sponsored events,” Sue Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson, told me. “The interior of the Pentagon Metro station is the property of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and we refer to WMATA regarding their policies on commercial advertising.” WMATA’s advertising guidelines prohibit “advertisements that are intended to influence public policy.”

That seems to pose no obstacle for defense contractors trying to get the government to buy their products. Part of the point of the ads, Hunter believes, is to remind policymakers of the industry’s power: “You could see it as a sector-wide warning to keep policymakers on their toes and remember that Lockheed Martin is always keeping an eye on what they’re doing.” Several congressional staffers claimed that their bosses, who sit on defense-related committees, had never seen the ads, which I suppose is possible if they spurn public transit and never look up. “Honestly, our team hasn’t seen or remembered a lot of these ads,” said a staffer for Representative Sara Jacobs of California. 

“It’s hard not to notice them when there’s literally not even a frickin’ map of your line when you enter the station. It’s just all KBR saying they want to cash in on Golden Dome,” said Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. “I see it every single day when I take the train, and I huff and puff with every step. It influences people on their commutes. No doubt.”

When Andrew Hunter started working on defense acquisition policy as a congressional staffer in the 1990s, he recalls, the ads were mostly limited to trade shows and trade publications like Defense News and Aviation Week. After the end of the Cold War, the prospects for defense contractors were bleaker than they’d ever been. In 1993, William Perry, Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of defense, gathered the heads of America’s largest defense contractors and told them that their sector would have to shrink. The enemy had been vanquished, and the government would no longer need to spend as much on defense. It couldn’t afford to sustain them all anymore.