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Reviews of The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives |
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Conspiracy theorists still hung up on the military-industrial complex need to update their cold war-era vocabulary: according to national security writer Nick Turse, the war machine's ever-extending reach now stretches beyond petroleum and telecoms to include a "military-doughnut complex" where confectionery chains supply soldiers with glazed buns. In this acronym-heavy book, Turse describes a range of "microcomplexes" connecting the US military to some surprising areas of civilian life. The fact you might share fish-finger suppliers with the US navy is one thing; details of the Guantánamo Bay Starbucks are something else. Much of Turse's research holds the Pentagon up to ridicule: their golf courses, the fast-food-addicted army that waddles rather than marches on its stomach. Yet the book turns sinister when it exposes desperate recruiters who allow white supremacists to join up, or defence department plans to develop "weaponised" moths and sharks. References to The Matrix could make Turse seem a paranoid geek. Unfortunately, this is no sci-fi fantasy.
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Nick Turse carefully follows the money trail of the Defense Department into everything from the traditional players in the defense contractor industry to a handful of Southern catfish restaurants… Through an often hilarious acknowledgement of the absurdity, Turse follows all the connections by relying mostly on Defense Department documentation of spending, pulling key dollar amounts and other figures from what must have been a painstaking research effort."
"With a combination of wit and number-crunching, Turse gives a multidimensional picture of the biggest elephant in every room: the Pentagon"
"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 then covers similar ground in greater detail…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?"
“Turse's documentation of the interweaving of corporate and military interests is fascinating, no matter where you place yourself on the ideological spectrum.”
"Nick Turse has done something pretty amazing in producing an entertaining account of the almost limitless variety of ways in which our money is wasted by what he calls the military industrial technological entertainment academic media corporate matrix, or "The Complex" for short..." |
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