Major U.S. high-tech defense contractors have just announced their third-quarter earnings, and for most of them times are good. The unexpectedly drawn-out conflict in Iraq means the U.S. Army has a steady flow of orders to replace and refurbish vehicles, and ongoing supplies of ammunition. The Democrat-controlled Congress did not decimate the U.S. ballistic missile defense program as so many thought it would. On the contrary, a broad bipartisan coalition in practice now exists in Congress on most of the major projects in BMD.

Nevertheless, one can discern a growing groundswell of popular skepticism, not against the U.S. armed forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but one with other potential targets in mind. Six years after Sept. 11, 2001, the men and women of the U.S. armed forces remain sacrosanct -- support for them is not in question. Even when the Iraq war is deeply unpopular, that controversy centers on the politicians who took the decision when and how to fight it, not on the hundreds of thousands of service men and women charged with fighting it.

But as polls continue to show the growing unpopularity of the war, that emotion cannot just limit itself to Republican political leaders and the Democrats in Congress who helped enable them: Growing angry criticism of major defense corporations may continue as well.

There are some signs that this is already happening. Time magazine, after slashing its serious news-gathering operations to the bone, a few weeks ago ran as its cover story a fierce attack on the U.S. Marines' controversial V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor. Critics of the article afterwards counter-charged that it was hyped and inaccurate. But the fact that it not only ran but was given pride of place in one of the two top-circulation news magazines in the country was certainly a sign of where the Zeitgeist -- the Spirit of the Times -- is moving.

However, we have been here before, and if such an anti-defense, anti-big business mood does kick in, it will not be for the first time, nor will it last forever.

For we have been there before: The post-Watergate scandal mood of skepticism in the United States in the mid-1970s saw the U.S. intelligence services, especially the CIA, largely gutted. They also saw a wave of highly publicized bribery and corruption scandals involving major U.S. defense contractors such as Lockheed, and the way they did business around the world in allied nations like Japan and Germany and across the Middle East and developing world. As a result, President Jimmy Carter, eager to prove his incorruptible wonder-bread credentials, pushed through, with the support of the Democrat-controlled Congress, anti-bribery and corruption guidelines.

The mood of skepticism and distrust didn't last, however. The 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the 444-day ordeal of the 52 American hostages seized in Tehran the following year put paid to that. So did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the ominous growth of Soviet world power in the years following the fall of South Vietnam to the communists. Americans woke up again to the fact that it is a dangerous world out there.

(Next: From Merchants of Death to the Spitfire)

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