Edward Luttwak

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Edward Nicolae Luttwak (born 1942) is an economist and historian known for his many publications on military strategy and international relations.

Luttwak was born in Arad, Romania, and later attended the London School of Economics and Johns Hopkins University, where he received a doctorate. His first academic post was at the University of Bath. As of 2004, he is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C..

He has served as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Department of State. He is a member of the National Security Study Group of the U.S. Department of Defense, and an associate of the Japan Finance Ministry's Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

Luttwak is a frequent lecturer and consultant, and has developed a reputation for offbeat proposals intended to provoke thought, for instance suggesting that major powers' attempts to quell regional wars actually make the wars more intense. His book Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook is perhaps his best-known work; it has been reprinted numerous times, and translated into 14 languages.

The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third has stirred a lot of controversy among professional historians. Luttwak is seen as an outsider and non-specialist in the field, but his book has raised a lot of questions and created a whole new wave of scholarship on the Roman army and barbarians on the frontier. Luttwak asked simply "How did the Romans defend the frontier?", a question that had been lost in the noise of professional discourse of demographics and economics and sociology. Although most professional historians reject his views on Roman "strategy," his 1976 book has been most useful for provoking discussion.

Luttwak, during his childhood, spent many years in Italy, between Palermo, in Sicily, and Milan, as a refugee. He speaks Italian well and is also a renowned political analyst and historian in that country; he also wrote two books in Italian (co-authored with Susanna Creperio Verratti, political philosopher and journalist): Che cos’è davvero la democrazia [What Democracy really Is], 1996 and Il libro delle Libertà [The Book of Liberties], 2000.

He serves on the editorial boards of Geopolitique (France), the Journal of Strategic Studies, and the Washington Quarterly. He speaks English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Books

A Dictionary of Modern War (London 1971), ISBN 0713901306
The Strategic Balance, 1972 (1972), ISBN 0912050330
The Political Uses of Sea Power (Baltimore, 1974), ISBN 0801816580
The US - USSR Nuclear Weapons Balance (Beverly Hills, 1974), ISBN 0803900961
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third (USA, 1976), ISBN 0801821584
Strategic Power: Military Capabilities and Political Utility (California, 1976), ISBN 0803906595
Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook (London 1979), ISBN 0674175476
Sea Power in the Mediterranean: Political Utility and Military Constraints (California 1979), ISBN 0819160105
The Israeli Army (with Dan Horowitz) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983), ISBN 0060127236
The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (London, 1983), ISBN 0312342608
The Pentagon and the Art of War (New York, 1984), ISBN 0671617702
Strategy and History (New Jersey, 1985), ISBN 0887380654
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987), ISBN 0674007034
The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States From Being a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (New York, 1993), ISBN 0671869639
Turbo-Capitalism: winners and losers in the global economy (HarperCollins, 1999), ISBN 0060193301

External links

Luttwak's page at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) [link]
Edward Luttwak. [Give War a Chance], Foreign Affairs, July 1999.
Edward Luttwak. [Iraq: The Logic of Disengagement (PDF-100KB)], Foreign Affairs, January 2005.

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