Reviews of The Complex: How The Military Invades Our Everyday Lives

" 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."
– Inter Press Service News Agency

"With a combination of wit and number-crunching, Turse gives a multidimensional picture of the biggest elephant in every room: the Pentagon"
— Foreign Policy In Focus

"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?" 
— Publishers Weekly

“Turse's documentation of the interweaving of corporate and military interests is fascinating, no matter where you place yourself on the ideological spectrum.”
— Noah Shachtman, contributing editor at Wired magazine, and the editor of its national security blog, "Danger Room"

"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..."
— David Swanson, Washington Director of Democrats.com and co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition