Author Archives: Haig Hovaness

The F-35 fighter jet is the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history, but one of its biggest failures isn’t in the air — it’s on the ground. The Pentagon’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), conceived as an ambitious plan to revolutionize fighter jet maintenance and logistics, collapsed under the weight of bad design, poor […]

Theodore Postol is a retired MIT physics professor who was a consultant to the Pentagon on nuclear weapons and missile defense. He recently published a presentation on Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, which he summarized in a YouTube interview. Professor Postol explains, in considerable detail, how the construction of a deliverable fission bomb is well within […]

Let’s talk about money, specifically the use of bribery as a weapon in war and geopolitics. Like any weapon, it has technical characteristics and operational effects. In the ancient world bribery was practiced openly in the form of tribute paid by subject states to dominant powers. Masters were bribed to “protect” their subjects. In the […]

Before our current age of nuclear war anxiety, there was widespread concern about an earlier terrifying weapon of mass destruction: poison gas. I will describe the history of war gases in the context of our current concerns about atomic war. It is an ugly topic, but examining it may provide some hope for a way […]

As the war in Ukraine moves toward an ugly conclusion unfavorable to the U.S., I anticipate the appearance of a common propaganda phenomenon following lost wars: the stab in the back. This is a propaganda tactic in which military defeat is attributed to domestic treachery undermining the heroic efforts of the military. The bellicose elements […]