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 (Harvard University Press).

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.

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