Fidelis Cloer takes aim at competition seen and unseen in Bulletproof Salesman.

“I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company. As he puts it, Coca-Cola and Burger King have been doing good business in Iraq, too. “The difference is, we do not have to create demand for our product,” he observes.

There’s an ocean of moral ambiguity here. Cloer’s pragmatism, fortunately, is matched by his charisma, which is the main reason Bulletproof Salesman’s 70-minute running time whizzes by like a stray round past your ear. As shaped by co-directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, it’s largely an Errol Morris-style long-form interview with Cloer, albeit one that follows him from 2003 Baghdad (“not as exciting” as Sarajevo a decade earlier, he says soon after his arrival) to 2007 Afghanistan, with stops at his company’s blast-test facility in Bavaria along the way.

The intervening years have been fat ones for Cloer’s firm, but demanding, too: Besides having to turn out an ever-increasing volume of armored vehicles as foreign visitors learn the folly of riding in “softskins,” they’ve had to make the cars tougher in response to the growing size of insurgents’ roadside bombs. Making a Mercedes sedan bulletproof (a term Cloer disdains, by the way, rightly noting that nothing truly is) is lot easier than making it bombproof.

Indeed, one of the doc’s more entertaining segments probes the definition of "bulletproof." An SUV successfully deflects 618 rounds fired at it from an AK-47 before Bullet No. 619 finally pierces its hide. Good enough for anywhere, except, perhaps, post-U.S. invasion Iraq. In another section, Cloer discusses how he and his colleagues sometimes travel in ordinary civilian taxis, the rationale being that insurgents are looking for armored SUVs to attack.

Far from being a huckster, Cloer is candid about his cars’ limitations. “People have to die for us to improve the product,” he says flatly, accepting the cycle of escalating firepower and reciprocal defenses as a given. He is utterly sincere in his claims of his company’s superiority -- going so far as to allow a potential customer to open fire on one of his cars while he sits calmly behind the wheel -- dissing both competitors who make civilian vehicles look like Humvees (arguing, again, that a car that looks like it’s armored calls itself out as an attractive target) and those who use cheap materials to undercut him on price. He claims at one point that 70 percent of the world’s heads of state who travel in armored cars buy German, and counts Yassir Arafat and Nelson Mandela among his clients.

Filmmakers Epperlein and Tucker refrain from any overt editorializing, although there are several moments where they place aphorisms of salesmanship like "Sell a Good Feeling" over freeze-frames, to mostly humorous effect.

So we’re left to make up our own minds about Cloer, whose intolerance for bullshit makes him a fairly ideal subject. At one point he asks rhetorically if a person selling bandages in a war zone is a profiteer, and answers, “Yes.” The doc is equally matter-of-fact in its portrayal of the precautions Cloer takes when he travels to sell in war zones: He looks perfectly at ease handling an MP5 submachine gun. “No one will come to our rescue if anything happens,” he explains. And yet where (or if) Cloer learned to shoot is left unaddressed, along with any other detail of his background. It’s as if his job is his life. And given that he’s willing to go to the world’s most dangerous places to move units, maybe it is.

Bulletproof Salesman screens tonight at 8:15 p.m. and tomorrow night at 9 p.m. at the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival.