Edward Luttwak


Edward Nicolae Luttwak is a Romanian-American political scientist known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations. He is best known for being the author of .

Early life and education

Luttwak was born into a Jewish family in Arad, Romania, and raised in Italy and England. After elementary school in Palermo, Sicily, he attended Carmel College and Quintin Grammar School in England, and served briefly in the British Army. He then studied analytical economics at the London School of Economics where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1964.
After working for the British, French, and Israeli militaries, he moved to the United States in 1972 for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS where he graduated with a PhD in International Relations in 1975. The title of his dissertation was Force and Diplomacy in Roman Strategies of Imperial Security.

Career

Luttwak was an instructor in economics at the University of Bath, England. He held posts at the Georgetown University, and SAIS before becoming a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Luttwak has been noted for his innovative policy ideas, suggesting for example that major powers' attempts to quell regional wars actually make conflicts more protracted. His book has been reprinted numerous times, and translated into 18 languages. His book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace is used as a textbook in war colleges and universities and has been translated into several languages.
In 1976 he published The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third which generated controversy among professional historians who saw Luttwak as an outsider and non-specialist in the field. However, the book is recognized as seminal because it raised basic questions about the Roman army and its defense of the Roman frontier. Although many professional historians argued against his views on Roman strategy, some at book length, his work undoubtedly increased interest in the study of Roman frontiers and strategy. Since the 1980s, he has published articles on the Byzantine Empire and his book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, was published in late 2009.
He provides consulting services to international corporations and government agencies including various branches of the U.S. government and the U.S. military. He has served as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, the United States Department of State, the United States Navy, United States Army, United States Air Force, and several NATO defense ministries. Working for OSD/Net Assessment, he co-developed the current maneuver-warfare concept, working for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, he introduced the "operational level of war" concept into U.S. Army doctrine, wrote the first manual for the Joint Special Operations Agency, and co-developed the Rapid-Deployment Force concept for the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.
He served on the editorial boards of Géopolitique, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The European Journal of International Affairs, and the Washington Quarterly. He speaks English, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish.
In 2004, Luttwak was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Bath. He also received honorary degrees from the university of Arad and of Bucarest
He is a member of the Italy-USA Foundation. He received the America Award from the Italy-USA Foundation in 2011.
He is chairman of the board of Aircraft Purchase Fleet Limited, an aviation lessor, and the head of a conservation ranch in the Amazon.

Criticism

Predictions

Luttwak's book Turbo-Capitalism: Winners And Losers In The Global Economy predicted the populist reaction according to Richard Rorty and many others. Also, his The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union emphasized its internal fragility in the face of resurgent national identities that Sovietologists considered folkloric and nothing more; it also disputed in great detail the CIA's estimate of the Soviet economy as grossly inflated. In his 2002 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard A. Posner said Luttwak "writes well and with authority and knows a lot—he is a serious historian and defense analyst. But writing as a public intellectual, he repeatedly ventures predictions that events falsify. In 1983, he pronounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a success. He also thought it likely that the Soviet Union would launch a limited war against China, especially if the West increased its military power. Years later, and indeed just a few months before the Berlin Wall came down, Luttwak was worrying that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika would augment the military power of the Soviet Union. Instead, those policies precipitated the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union."
Besides also citing Luttwak's prediction, in response to a question, of the impoverishment of all but a small minority of Americans "soon enough", Posner wrote that Luttwak predicted, shortly before the first Persian Gulf War, that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would evacuate Kuwait "after a week or two of bombing and warned that the use of ground forces 'could make Desert Storm a bloody, grinding combat with thousands of casualties.' The ground fighting lasted only four days, rather than the minimum of two weeks that Luttwak predicted, and U.S. casualties were minimal. Writing a month into the bombing, Luttwak was no longer predicting heavy casualties but he still opposed a ground campaign. He thought it would lead inevitably to a military occupation of Iraq from which we would be unable to disengage without disastrous foreign policy consequences."
Luttwak made a casualties prediction in a Reuters article on August 23, 1990, in which he was quoted by reporter Jim Wolf as saying, "Don't think that your precision weapons and your gadgets and your gizmos and your stealth fighters are going to make it possible to reconquer Kuwait without many thousands of casualties".
In a 2003 essay in The Next American Century: Essays in Honor of Richard G. Lugar, Kenneth Adelman, a former director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, criticized such "fear–mongering" and added, "As it happened, our 'gizmos' worked wonders".
Luttwak predicted in a 2016 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration would pursue a foreign policy "unlikely to deviate from standard conservative norms", withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, avoiding involvement in Syria and Libya, eschewing trade wars, and modestly reducing spending — in short, "changes at the margin."

Confidence

Writing in 2007 for the National Review, former George W. Bush's speechwriter David Frum said Luttwak "is a very genuinely interesting writer. His book on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire was terrific, and his Coup d'État is that astounding thing: a great work of political science that is also a hilarious satire. Part of the secret of his success is his tone of total confidence. He makes startling claims in a tone that says, 'If only you knew my super-secret sources.'" Frum was writing on the occasion of having just seen a column by Luttwak in the UK magazine, Prospect, titled "The Middle of Nowhere", in which Luttwak "magisterially and sardonically attacks a whole series of intellectual errors that allegedly dominate expert opinion on the Middle East".

Published works

Several books among those listed below have also been published in foreign language editions, in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Books

In Japanese only:
In Italian only:
As contributor:
Preface, foreword:
Luttwak has written book reviews for publications such as The American Spectator, Commentary Magazine, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and The New York Times.