Author Archives: Haig Hovaness

Over the past two decades, use of U.S. military force has shifted from an exceptional act governed by law and public accountability to a flexible, discretionary instrument of policy. This article examines how post-9/11 legal authorities, institutional convergence, and secrecy have eroded the boundaries between war, intelligence, and governance—producing a system of permanent, unbounded conflict.

For more than a century, the Philippines has been afflicted by recurring internal conflict—colonial rebellion, communist insurgency, separatist war, Islamist militancy. This article argues that these episodes are not discrete failures but manifestations of a persistent condition of managed instability, structurally conditioned by the country’s incorporation into U.S. grand strategy beginning in 1898. From counterinsurgency as governance to modern access agreements, the Philippines has been treated less as a sovereign project to be completed than as a strategic position to be held—an approach whose risks are now sharpening under renewed great-power competition.

The 2025 National Security Strategy is being read as another Trumpist manifesto, but buried in the text is something far more consequential: Washington’s first formal admission that Full Spectrum Dominance is dead. The NSS concedes that the US can no longer fund the military, industrial, and diplomatic machinery required for unipolar primacy, and quietly writes the obituary for the post–Cold War order it was supposed to sustain.

DARPA once defined the frontier of U.S. technological power, developing the foundations of stealth, networking, and precision-guided warfare. Today its most capable prototypes routinely die in the “valley of death,” casualties of political caution, industrial consolidation, and perverse incentives that punish programs for succeeding. This article examines how DARPA went from the nation’s most creative engine of capability to an agency whose breakthroughs are celebrated but rarely fielded—and what this reveals about America’s broader institutional decline.

In late 2025, a major RAND Corporation study on U.S.–China strategy was quietly withdrawn from public view less than two weeks after publication. The unusual disappearance suggests an internal struggle over whether the United States should escalate rivalry with China or first rebuild its own industrial and technological base. The RAND report’s realism posed a challenge to the prevailing hawkish narrative.