The Strategy of Survival (July/August 1988 | Volume: 39, Issue: 5)

The Strategy of Survival

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Authors: Fredric Smoler

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5

Edward Luttwak is the author of nine books on the art of war, and he pronounces with startling confidence on a great array of events, as the titles of his works suggest. One is The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, another The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union. His most recent book is last year’s Strategy.

Luttwak was born in Arad, Transylvania, in 1942. His family emigrated first to Palermo, Sicily, in 1947, and then to England, where he was educated at Carmel College and the London School of Economics and took infantry training with the British Cadet Corps (“it’s one of the reflections on the general decay of military practices through a period of forty years of peace,” he says, “that in the 1950s Britain gave schoolboys more weapons training than a U.S. infantryman now receives under the standard course”). He published his first book, Coup d’Etat, when he was twenty-five, and, after moving to America, took his doctorate from Johns Hopkins. He has worked as an analyst and consultant for a variety of institutions, including the Defense and State departments, and he is currently affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C.

 

Although Luttwak would no doubt argue that war, as a sphere of intricate, impressive, and profoundly dramatic human endeavor, is worth studying for the most disinterested reasons, he has in fact devoted much of his life to helping his adopted country prepare to defend itself on NATO’s central front. It is there that the conventional forces of the Soviet Union are commonly believed to have amassed a decisive superiority, there where her armored divisions are thought to pose the most profound wartime threat to her adversaries.

Luttwak has written extensively on the possibilities of defending that border, and in his thinking on this subject he uses history in the most practical manner. To him, the past is a great book, and its contents constitute the sum of knowledge necessary for the achievement of a concrete task. When he consults volumes of history, Luttwak seeks urgently needed lessons from them.

The specialist literature cascades over the available surfaces in his study, and although the Loeb classics are generally those bearing on his trade, a copy of Diogenes Laertius suggests a man broad enough in learning and old-fashioned enough to read Greek for the pleasure of it.

How did you happen to become a specialist in military matters?

Well, I can give you a jocular answer. It may contain some seriousness. I was born in Transylvania, an exceptionally contested part of Europe. Transylvania is contested today. I was born in the midst of the Second World War, the greatest and most sinister of wars known to Europe, a catastrophic war, in which it was not merely defense lines that were torn down or territories