The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives

by JasonFord (Cover Design), NickTurse (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $4.24

  The Pentagon works with Hollywood to develop new robot weapons systems, and encourages Hollywood to glorify and sanitise military violence. The military works with computer manufacturers to develop more efficient ways of killing, and the products from that collaboration are fed back as cool new kit for the impressionable youth. Food companies are drawn into research on meals and drugs that will make soldiers stay awake for longer, be more alert and hyped up. Western society is becoming militarised in hitherto unimaginable ways. This is the new, high-tech military-industrial complex: it is everywhere and nowhere. Nick Turse draws this strange, frightening world-within-the-world into the light.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $20.68

  Fascinating, no matter where you place yourself on the ideological spectrum. --Wired

  Now in paperback, a stunning breakdown of the modern 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. He 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 Marvel Comics and NASCAR. Similarly disturbing is the way in which the military, desperate for fresh recruits, has tapped 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.