Author Archives: Haig Hovaness

Silicon Valley’s entry into defense contracting is often framed as a long-overdue modernization of a bureaucratic Pentagon. This article argues that the venture capital model is structurally misaligned with the requirements of strategic defense systems engineering. The rise of a Military–Industrial–Venture Complex risks collapsing governance into product design, accelerating technological deployment without corresponding institutional capacity, and increasing escalation and democratic accountability risks.

Nuclear proliferation is no longer driven primarily by rogue ambition or regional instability. It is increasingly a rational response to a global order in which legal restraints on force are eroding and security guarantees appear contingent and unreliable. As military power displaces law as the ultimate arbiter of security, nuclear weapons reassert themselves as the only credible deterrent against coercion—pulling multiple threshold states toward rapid proliferation and dangerous alliance entanglements.

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.