Maddow shows how deeply militarized our culture has become--how the role of the national security sector has shape-shifted and grown over the past century to the point of being financially unsustainable and confused in mission.

The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has become our one-stop-shopping solution to global problems....