The Double Life of a Military Strategist - Edward Luttwak

**bourbon** · 06-11-2008

Interesting profile of Edward Luttwak in The Forward by Laura Rozen.

The Operator: The Double Life of a Military Strategist, By Laura Rozen. The Forward, Jun 05, 2008.

“I am an operator,” Luttwak said.

Indeed he is, one who carries out field operations, extraditions, arrests, interrogations (never, he insists, using physical violence), military consulting and counterterrorism training for different agencies of the U.S., foreign governments and private interests. When we met, in February, the Drug Enforcement Agency was his latest client; Luttwak says he went to Colombia to help arrest and deliver a couple of Mexican drug runners wanted by the DEA.

Luttwak is of course better known as a public intellectual, the author of some 16 books, as well as a forthcoming study on warfare in Byzantium, set to be published next year by Harvard University Press. “We will never be the Roman empire,” Luttwak said, summarizing his thesis. “Bush, the genius, if he’s lucky, will create a situation as in Byzantium, where the different enemies fight each other.” In fact, his two identities have always been intertwined: On a first name basis with the heads of Italian and other foreign government security agencies, Luttwak performs such quasi paramilitary operations — under the vague title of “consultant” — while maintaining a public image as a military historian, thinker and writer, if a frequently (and deliberately) controversial one.

**Stevely** · 06-11-2008

I thought good operators were supposed to keep their activity on the down low?

**SteveMetz** · 06-11-2008

I don't know how "good" he is, but Dr. Luttwak is certainly not your normal operator.

**bourbon** · 06-11-2008

“Operator” is probably used in a different context here. This is more a human interest story than anything else, but I thought it would be of interest to the board. Seems like he could write a heck of an interesting autobiography someday.

**Tom Odom** · 06-12-2008

Originally Posted by bourbon

“Operator” is probably used in a different context here. This is more a human interest story than anything else, but I thought it would be of interest to the board. Seems like he could write a heck of an interesting autobiography someday.

Perhaps but I would read it as blatant self-promotion through a willing journalist. No one that I knew or know in the agencies the good Dr Luttwak refers to would have anything to do with someone so given to declaring what he is dong. Secondly it is naive to say the least to believe that if you sell yourself as an "operator" you can continue to "operate" on foreign soil in a non-official non-declared status without any consequences.

Remember too the good Dr Luttwak's suggestion that we should use scorched earth tactics as the basis of our operations in Iraq and elsewhere. I thought Dave Kilcullen did a most admirable job of demolishing that argument on here in Edward Luttwak’s “Counterinsurgency Malpractice”

I rather liked the following paragraph from the Kilcullen blog article:

Having knocked the stuffing out of the straw-man, Dr Luttwak suggests an “easy and reliable way of defeating all insurgencies everywhere”: essentially, to “out-terrorize” insurgents through reprisals, mass executions, and collective punishments. He cites German forces in the Second World War, claiming this approach was standard, “and very effective it was too in containing resistance movements with very few troops”. Again, I beg to differ. One German officer on the Eastern Front remarked: “the German Army in Russia was like an elephant attacking a nest of ants. The elephant will kill millions. But in the end the ants will eat him to the bone”. German methods in Yugoslavia, Greece and Russia proved extremely counterproductive. And as Barbara Tuchman argued in The Guns of August, earlier German brutality against civilians in Belgium and France in 1914 helped provoke worldwide revulsion, contributing to eventual American intervention and German defeat in the First World War. (These are historical observations, of course, and do not in any way impugn modern Germany or today's Bundeswehr).

Tom