The Complex

“This is a deeply disturbing audit of the Pentagon’s influence on American life, especially its subtle conscription of popular imagination and entertainment technology. If Nick Turse is right, the ‘Matrix’ may be just around the corner.”—Mike Davis, author of Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

“When President Eisenhower warned of the dangers to democracy posed by the military-industrial complex, he had no idea how far it would penetrate into every aspect of our everyday lives. In impressive detail, Nick Turse shows how the military is now tied to everything from your morning cup of Starbucks to the video games your kids play before turning in for the night. It's not just political anymore—it’s personal. Turse sounds the alarm bell about the militarization of everyday life. Now it’s up to us to do something about it.”—Bill Hartung, author of How Much Are You Making on the War Daddy?

“Nick Turse’s searing, investigative journalism reveals just how deeply embedded in our lives the war-making system is and why we should be viscerally alarmed. He exposes how, with a growing contingent of corporate/entertainment/academic/media collaborators, the Pentagon has not only garrisoned the globe, but come home to dominate the United States. For anyone interested in understanding the crisis this country is in, The Complex is indispensable reading.”—Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone

“Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. For example, the gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and sign up gullible 18 to 24 year-olds are anything but voluntary. Nick Turse has produced a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon’s pervasive influence in our lives.”—Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

"Freelance journalist Turse hits on a fact well-known to anyone in the film and television business: The military spends lavishly in the civilian sphere, and the private sector rushes to milk whatever it can from the defense budget. In the instance of Apple, he writes, the military equipped flyers and on-the-ground tacticians with PowerBooks. Did Steve Jobs make a push to get his products, and not Bill Gates's, into the hands of the troopers? That would be a different story, but that's not the one Turse tells . . . The military has funded basic research at universities for a century; a newish development, as Turse properly points out, is that the R&D budget has mushroomed in the last few years, a byproduct of the growth of military spending in general . . . Another sort-of-new development is the Defense Department's interest in video games as training devices, which has brought many a graphic-art and game-design graduates a paycheck."—Kirkus Reviews

"In his exhaustively researched first book concerning the extent to which the 'military industrial complex' has infiltrated the life of the average American, journalist Turse starts off by documenting how many times supposedly innocent consumer choices support major Pentagon contractors, and then covers similar ground in greater detail. Turse has up-to-date information on a previously well-covered subject and casts a wide net, including the movie industry, video gaming and military recruitment tactics, in his analysis. Many of Turse's facts are purely economic, but some of them are astonishing. Who knew, for example, that in 2005, the Department of Defense spent $1.2 million on donuts in Kuwait? Or that Harvard received over $300 million in DoD funds in 2002, after being pressured, despite concerns about discrimination, to allow military recruiters access to its law school students?"—Publishers Weekly