�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 expos� of the Pentagon�s pervasive influence in our lives.�

-�Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic


From the publisher, Metropolitan Books:

An eye-opening investigation of the all-pervasive, 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. Mapping out what should more properly be called the Military-Industrial-Technological-Entertainment-Scientific-Media-Intelligence-Corporate Complex, historian Nick Turse demonstrates just how extensively the Pentagon, through its little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with America's major corporations, has taken hold of the nation.

From iPods to Starbucks coffee to Oakley sunglasses, 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 a 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.


From an online reviewer:

This book begins with a short catalogue of the various products in your cupboard that are made by companies with huge Department of Defense contracts and continues by identifying the Navy technicians who helped design your child's computer games. In between, Nick Turse, an elegant writer, and clearly a fearsome researcher, details the ways the military has insinuated itself into all of our everyday lives -- from the products we buy, the toys our children play with to the institutions that we depend upon. It is a story that begins with President Eisenhower's famous parting words about the dangers posed by the military-industrial complex and continues through the Iraq debacle that we're now living through. This is an important book.

"The Complex" is a publication of "The American Empire Project." Tom Englehardt, of TomDispatch, is co-founder and co-editor of the innovative publishing project.

"Americans have long believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words -- American empire -- have been on everyone's lips. At this moment of unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we get to this point? And what lies down the road?

To address these questions, Metropolitan Books offers the American Empire Project. In these short, argument-driven books, our leading writers and thinkers will mount an immodest challenge to the fateful exercise of empire-building and to explore every facet of the developing American imperium, while suggesting alternate ways of thinking about, confronting, and acting in a new American century."