Giving Santa Claus and his reindeer a military fighter jet escort on Christmas Eve amounts to manipulative military marketing aimed at defenseless young minds, a Berkeley, Calif., child psychologist says.

NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canada military force that protects our skies as well as runs the beloved Santa Tracker each holiday season, is under fire. The reason? A video that shows Santa and his reindeer accompanied by a military fighter jet escort. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has criticized the video, and, in turn, the campaign has been criticized for its criticism.

“We’ve gotten some angry emails … questioning my manhood,” Josh Golin, the campaign’s associate director, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. So Golin, and the campaign’s co-founder, Berkeley child and family psychologist Allan Kenner, would like the opportunity to give a full airing to their side of the controversy:

They say they are not anti-military or anti-American — but they are against any kind of advertising aimed at young, vulnerable minds.

“What’s getting lost in the controversy is the child-development piece,” Golin said. It’s easy for adults to look at the video above and say “What’s the big deal?”

“But we are talking about 4-year-olds and 6-year-olds,” Golin said. “For young children, the idea of Santa, and that there are ‘bad guys’ who might want to ‘get’ Santa, so he needs the jets, that can be very disturbing.”

He said that there was no shortage of studies that tie child-aimed advertising and media influences to a variety of ills, such as childhood obesity, violence and bullying.

Kenner said in a separate interview Wednesday that advertisers aimed to manipulate and poison defenseless young minds to create “cradle-to-grave brand loyalty.” He called it “very cynical manipulation.” And he believes the video is a sign that the military is using some of these very same methods to indoctrinate children into supporting, endorsing and perhaps even one day joining the military.

“It is essentially a marketing device for the military in search of future recruitment,” he said.

As it has every year since 1955, the North American Aerospace Defense Command will be tracking Santa on his whirlwind journey to deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls around the world.

But he won’t be escorted by armed fighter jets.

When NORAD recently launched its yearly online Santa tracker, the site featured a video showing the jolly old elf being escorted by U.S. fighter jets “bristling with missiles,” as the Boston Globe put it.

That caused a minor earthquake in the Twitterverse about why Santa would need an armed escort. The answer: Russia.

But a NORAD spokesman confirmed to Military Times that the “missiles” are actually fuel tanks.

“Guilty as charged, we tried to give it a more operational feel this year; that was purposefully done to try to highlight our mission sets,” said Lt. Cmdr. Bill Lewis. “If you look at the second promo video we have where it talks through a mock training exercise, it really lays out what our different missions are and shows the different radar sets.”

So while NORAD will be tracking Santa’s flight this Christmas, if St. Nick gets into a tussle with some MiGs, his only defense will be the evasive capabilities of his reindeer.