In her 2011 thesis for Lehigh University entitled Strange Bedfellows: Cooperation between Hollywood and the Pentagon, Olga Zhakova covers the US government’s influence on a number of films, including Clear and Present Danger.

Zhakova writes the following about the backroom negotiations that took place to produce the thriller based on Tom Clancy’s novel:

The process of negotiating on Clear and Present Danger consisted of several stages. In the first stage the armed services involved in the project were given the script for review. All of them recommended disapproving the project for some similar and some varied reasons. However, some people in the DoD thought that the film would be beneficial to the military and insisted on finding a compromise for support. All objections were discussed between the DoD and the filmmakers. The script was rewritten several times to meet all the objections, and then the final script was given to all the services involved for the second and final review. This entire expedited review process took five months.

The paper details the numerous complaints that the DoD had with the script, as it depicted the US conducting a covert war against drug traffickers in Colombia. Among these issues, as Zhakova writes, “was that the script did not portray Marines “as heroes.””

She also notes that the government took issue with “the President and National Security advisor starting an illegal war and the military knowingly participating in it,” a rather hilarious objection given the US government’s documented history of covert operations and regime change throughout Latin America.

Zhakova’s paper also includes the following:

As for the comments on specific scenes, the Marine Corps Public Affairs Office objected to the scene showing the Navy bombing and killing civilians, even though it was not depicting Marines. The Office commented that this scene “portrays the military’s reactions to the death of the civilians as ‘that’s collateral damage and it’s just a fact of war that civilians will be killed.’” Major Jerry Broeckert, writing the memo for the OASD/PA, pointed out in this respect the following: “I don’t think we need to reinforce that stereotype.” This scene with the Navy jet fighter bombing a civilian target would become one of the main changes made to the script.