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.