(FORTUNE Magazine) – As if NATO's decision whether to open a ground offensive in Kosovo weren't weighty enough, consider: It could affect your next car purchase. Without diminishing the gravity of the Yugoslav conflict, war is not only hell but a product-testing ground, and the military-consumer complex finds its truest expression where the tread meets the road.

History tells us that even if you can win a war from the air, it takes ground troops to move product. The Jeep came to us via World War II; the Gulf war begat the Hummer. Now we have the Mercedes-Benz $135,000 Gelaendewagen, a military truck turned sport-ute for the white-collar armored cavalryman. Sure, the well off may not have to fight our wars any longer, but that doesn't mean they don't dig the gizmos: Cadillac recently partnered with Raytheon to adapt its night-vision technology to alert drivers of the 2000 DeVille to enemy units, a.k.a. paperboys and deer. New minivans use sonar to back into parking spaces, and numerous navigation systems, like OnStar, marry cell phone technology with Pentagon-pedigreed Global Positioning System satellites to track stolen vehicles, call for emergency help, or find restaurants. If you've ever wondered why Khrushchev ruined a perfectly nice shoe railing against capitalist decadence, try pondering the question while using millions of dollars worth of space hardware to find a chicken chimichanga.

There's just something sexy about commanding a war machine. Or even something that sounds like one: Dodge's sporty Stealth, for instance, was serendipitously introduced into showrooms in 1990--just as the Air Force's sporty Stealths were being introduced into Saddam's backyard. (The military's own brand strate-gies can trigger bitter ironies. The former land of the Iroquois and Cherokee found itself deploying Apache attack helicopters and Tomahawk missiles in Kosovo against, of all things, ethnic cleansing.) The current dustup Over There may not create synergies--Operation Allied Force doesn't make an effective brand name for anything, except maybe laundry detergent--but there's a receptive market. Americans are reluctant to deploy ground forces overseas. But in their own driveways? That's something else entirely.

--James Poniewozik