I asked my dad a similar question, growing up in the 1970s-1980s era. "Why is IBM running TV commercials for mainframe computers on The Dukes of Hazzard? Don't those cost millions of dollars? Do they think we're going to buy one?" He muttered something about how the commercials might encourage people to buy IBM stock.

Later, I realized that the reason for those commercials was to make IBM more or less synonymous with "computers" in my adolescent mind. They were playing a very long game... too long, as it turned out, but still not an altogether bad strategy. Maybe that's why the arms manufacturers do similar things.

If he were alive today, I'd ask him some other hard-to-answer questions, such as "Why are the Democrats still obsessing over gun control, when all it does is cost them one election after another?" I guess it's just another misguided long game.