Quote Originally Posted by whsieh View Post
I actually liked Luttwak's book on Strategy--it was very subtle in lots of ways--and I've heard good things about his book on the Romans, which I've never actually read. But yeah, I've seen his stuff on counterinsurgency, and I agree that there's a certain unreality to it. I thought his op-ed a while back on the strategic possibilities of the Sunni/Shia split for larger American policy in the region to be really interesting, but that was a different issue than COIN. I did see Dr. Kilcullen's response to Luttwak here, and I thought he had the better part of the argument. Schultz and Dew had a more interesting critique of the COIN manual in a NYT Op-ed a while back, but I think that that was when the manual was still in draft form.

Peters is well... Peters. I actually think he has some good ideas, and the odd thing about the piece I mentioned is that he does endorse MA degrees and language learning, but there's just so much.... invective involved. And I was quite flabbergasted by the extraordinary repeated exchange regarding LTC Nagl.

WWSH
The clearest recent expression of Luttwak's thinking was in Harpers. And you're right about the NYT op ed: they were working off of the interim manual which I also though was very bad. I made 83 detailed, line in/line out comments on an early draft of it, some simply factual corrections, and none of them were used.