Ummm except that there are huge factories that manufacture these weapons (a few of which he visits in the course of the film) that legislators try to get built in their districts and at which people decide to work. I'm a bit confused about how we're supposed to be personally responsible for all our economic choices, to take personal responsibility for our actions, etc. but when those choices lead to people getting bombed, the connection between those two things is off.
It's a fairly empirical connection, so far as I can tell. (Churchill isn't relevant at all to the conversation except as a tool of ad hominem attack in your argument) Certainly the degrees of responsiblity increase as one heads up the ladder, and the other options chosen between are certainly relevant, but they hardly make drawing some lines between competing interests and end results irrelevant. In any case, that isn't the argument of the film.
> To claim a person's responsibility of the sort that you claim, you need to
> show two things: (i) that the person had the capacity of making or at least
> influencing actual decisions that led to the outcome in question (as opposed
> to being a mere spectator or even a cheerleader); and (ii) that the person
> had, or should have had, knowledge of the negative outcome of that decision.
>
Have you seen the film? As with many documentaries, it isn't really making one argument and the discussion of defense industry is only one part of it. Further, he's not blaming anyone, he's just showing that it is a deeply embedded system that would be difficult to change now that it's in place. As for whether one is responsible if one helps to make bombs that get dropped by US warplanes or guns sold to warlords, I guess that's a moral burden those folks work out for themselves. But I don't think the logical backflips you've just performed do a whole lot to completely exonerate anyone.
Again, none of this is the point of the film. Just trying to clarify the two sentences I wrote above that have led you to the lengthy thesis for why it is a suspect film with a fallacious argument. The film is supposed to give viewers an idea of just how extensive the military-industrial connection is to US policy making--and our everyday lives. I don't think there's all that much that's contentious about that except, perhaps, the charming faith it seems to have that there is still some democratic (small "d") oversight that could change it.