Edward Luttwak

Edward Nicolae Luttwak (born 4 November 1942) is an American author known for his works on grand strategy, military strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations.

He is best known for being the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook.

His book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, also published in Chinese, Russian and ten other languages, is widely used at war colleges around the world.

His books are currently published in 29 languages besides English.

Luttwak was born into a Jewish family in Arad, Romania, and raised in Sicily and in England.

After attending a boarding school in Berkshire, where he joined the British Army cadet corps, Luttwak moved to London at the age of 16 and went to a grammar school.

He then studied analytical economics at the London School of Economics.

Luttwak was a lecturer in economics at the University of Bath from 1964 to 1966.

Luttwak was a war volunteer in Israel in 1967 and later worked for the Israel Defense Forces.

In 1968, when he was 26 and working in London as a consultant for the oil industry, he published the book Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, a pastiche of a military manual.

The book explains in detail how to overthrow the government of a state, looking in particular at coups d'état on the African continent and in the Middle East.

The spy fiction author John le Carré praised the book and compared Luttwak to Machiavelli.

Luttwak graduated from the London School of Economics in 1969.

Earlier, during a two-month visit to Washington, D.C. in 1969, Luttwak and Richard Perle, his former roommate in London, joined a thinktank, the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defence Policy, assembled by Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze to lobby Congress for anti-ballistic missile systems.

In 1972 he moved to the United States for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

In late 1974 and into 1975 a series of articles was published by neoconservative intellectuals discussing whether the US military should seize the oilfields in Saudi Arabia.

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.

In March 1975, Harper's Magazine published an article that Luttwak had written under the pseudonym "Miles Ignotus" with the title "Seizing Arab Oil".

Luttwak had previously published the gist of his argument on how to break Arab power under the title "Obsolescent Elites", using his real name, in The Times Literary Supplement.

In 1976 Luttwak 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 a 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.

Later he started researching the Byzantine empire, beginning with its earliest surviving texts.

According to Harry Sidebottom, the majority of scholars were hostile to Luttwak's enthusiasm for fighting wars on client state territory and the book made uncomfortable reading in some circles in western Europe because in the 1980s Luttwak became a security consultant to U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

He suggested that U.S. Marines, assisted by the 82nd Airborne Division, should storm the eastern beaches of Saudi Arabia.

The article and the author attracted considerable attention, but there is no evidence that the Ford administration ever considered such an intervention.

James Akins, then U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, publicly denounced the "invasion scenario" as a product of "sick minds".

In 1987 Luttwak published Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.

According to Luttwak's publisher, Harvard University Press, the book has been widely acclaimed.

Luttwak became known for his innovative ideas.

He suggested, for example, that attempts by major powers to quell regional wars actually make conflicts more protracted.

Luttwak went on to provide consulting services to multinational corporations and government agencies, including various branches of the U.S. government and the U.S. military.

Luttwak has served on the editorial boards of Géopolitique (France), the Journal of Strategic Studies, The European Journal of International Affairs, and the Washington Quarterly.

He speaks English, French, Hebrew, Italian,and Spanish, in addition to his native Romanian.

In 1997, with three partners, he purchased 19,000 hectares of land in the Bolivian Amazon, where he set up a cattle ranch.

In 2004 Luttwak told the Wall Street Journal that he had written the article "after discussion with several like-minded consultants and officials in the Pentagon".

In 2004 Luttwak was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (LLD) from the University of Bath.

He has also received honorary degrees from a university in Arad, Romania and another from Timisoara's University as well as the University of Bucharest.

His book The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire was published in late 2009.

Leon Wieseltier, who got to know Luttwak during the Reagan years, wrote: "Edward was this figure out of a Werner Herzog film. He was not some person who had read a bit of Tacitus and now worked at the Pentagon. He knew all the languages, the geographies, the cultures, the histories. He is the most bizarre humanist I have ever met."