Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address opens the film with his warning about the 'military-industrial complex,' and Eugene Jarecki spends the rest of it tracing what became of that warning. The film moves from the Pentagon budget process to the defense contractors who profit from it, with interviews running from Senator John McCain and neoconservative strategist William Kristol to historian Chalmers Johnson and Gore Vidal. Its emotional center is Wilton Sekzer, a retired NYPD officer whose son died on 9/11 and who asked the Air Force to write his son's name on a bomb dropped on Iraq, then has to reckon with the war's shifting justifications. Archival footage tracks the buildup to the 2003 invasion, the search for weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, and the defense industry's reach into nearly every congressional district in the country. The film treats Eisenhower's speech less as history than as prophecy already fulfilled, building its case through the people who build the weapons, sell them, and send soldiers to use them.