The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives by Nick Turse

Synopsis

A mind-boggling investigation of the allpervasive, constantly morphing presence of the Pentagon in daily life—a real-world Matrix come alive

Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex—an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives.

From iPods to Starbucks to Oakley sunglasses, historian Nick Turse explores the Pentagon's little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with the products and companies that now form the fabric of America. Turse investigates the remarkable range of military incursions into the civilian world: the Pentagon's collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers; its outlandish schemes to weaponize the wild kingdom; its joint ventures with the World Wrestling Federation and NASCAR. He shows the inventive ways the military, desperate for new recruits, now targets children and young adults, tapping into the “culture of cool” by making “friends” on MySpace.

A striking vision of this brave new world of remote-controlled rats and super-soldiers who need no sleep, The Complex will change our understanding of the militarization of America. We are a long way from Eisenhower's military-industrial complex: this is the essential book for understanding its twenty-first-century progeny.

Kirkus Reviews

Or, buy an iPod, kill an Iraqi. 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, which doesn't hold many surprises for anyone who's been paying attention. 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. "Not surprisingly," Turse writes, "with this kind of clout, the Pentagon can often dictate the sort of research that gets undertaken (and the sort that doesn't)." True enough, but the same is true when Big Pharma buys drug-discovery research in chemistry departments, or when ADM funds ethanol research, and so on. 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 graduate a paycheck. Throughout, Turse employs a tone of alarm and indignation. Whereas the military has paid enlistment bonuses since the days of Caesar, in his eyes such an inducement to serve constitutes "a potentially life-changing bribe." And whereas war has been a constant of human history, Turse professes surprise that innocents should be caught in the crossfire. Atypical note: "Of course, many would have no need for high-tech prosthetics if, for so many years, the U.S. military hadn't pumped so much money into weaponry development, especially land mine research and production." But did the U.S. military plant ten million-plus mines in Afghanistan, that vast marketplace of prosthetic devices? For those who like their journalism fevered and their politics pat. Agent: Melissa Flashman/Trident Media Group

Biography

Nick Turse holds a doctorate in history from Columbia University. The associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and The Village Voice, as well as for a host of online sites. Turse currently resides in Union City, New Jersey.