Tag: Edward Luttwak

Active Defense – John Keegan

Synopsis:

Active defense – for John Keegan – involves a fusion of fixed fighting positions with offensive force dispersion. In this way, military control over a battle space is the sought after product of an active defense. Further, an active defense may advance – or sustain – a greater strategic defense architecture via operational ways and means.

Excerpts:

“A stronghold is a place not merely of safety from attack but also of active defense, a center where the defenders are secure from surprise or superior numbers, and also a base from which they may sally forth to hold predators at bay and to impose military control over the area in which their interests lie.

“A refuge is a place of short-term safety, of value only against an enemy who lacks the means to linger in the vicinity or who operates a crude strategy of raiding against soft targets.

“Above all, it must provide means for the garrison to wage an active defense – fighting-platforms that command a field of fire over prepared killing-grounds and strong gates through which counter-attacks can be mounted at moments of opportunity.

“Edward Luttwak, in his The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, has successfully propagated the belief that the Romans, like the British in India, firmly conceived a scheme of what could and could not be defended, though varying the method by which it was defended in practice – strong central army first, then strong local defense, finally an unsatisfactory mixture of the two – as their fortunes dictated.

“A besieger’s best hope of a quick result, according to the classical strategist Polybius, lay in exploiting the defenders’ complacency or achieving surprise. Treachery was another device.

*All excerpts have been taken from A History of Warfare, Vintage Books.

Military Failure in Vietnam – Edward Luttwak

Synopsis:

According to Edward Luttwak, top-down institutional dispersion of the ways as well as means of warfighting among the service branches tended to increase fog and friction for American forces during the Vietnam War. Further, the dispersion advanced competing operational assumptions and ends vis-à-vis American strategy – which decreased overall cohesion. Finally, Luttwak blames top-down bureaucratic so-called ‘self-indulgence’ for eroding American strategic dexterity via continuous expansion.

Excerpts:

“By 1968 there were 110 generals and admirals actually in Vietnam, 64 of them for the Army alone; a small number were actually in command of forces in the field, but most were in Saigon, along with hundreds and hundreds of colonels.

“In practice, however, there was no single and coherent strategy that would select the appropriate force for each time and place. Instead there was only the unified command system, which parceled out the territory and the targets ‘equitably’ and then allowed each element to carry out its own standard operations, appropriate or not.

“But when there are many strategies, there is no strategy – in Vietnam then, as in the making of peacetime military policy in Washington till now. So it was that institutional self-indulgence deprived the United States of any true chance of success. Indochina was full of trees and brave men, and mere force unguided by strategy could not prevail.

“The country gave its men to be soldiers, but the system turned them into clerks and valets, mechanics and storekeepers, in huge and disproportionate numbers.

“But American lives were in danger, because a war was being fought; the best way of ending the casualties was to win the war, and that could be done only by successful tactics that would implement successful operational schemes derived from a successful strategy.

*All excerpts have been taken from The Pentagon and the Art of War, Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire – Edward Luttwak

Synopsis:

Military historian and strategist Edward Luttwak traverses late Roman history as well as Byzantine history in order to examine the overarching schema, notions, and prevailing strategic outlook that maintained the Byzantine Empire for nearly a thousand years following the demise of the Western Roman Empire. Surrounded on all sides by enemies, and not having the manpower dominance of Republican Rome, the Byzantines were adept at remaining powerful by other means.

Excerpts:

“The Huns and all their successors inevitably used their tribute gold to buy necessities and baubles from the empire – special arrangements were negotiated for border markets – hence the gold exported to the Huns returned to circulate within the empire rather quickly, except for the minute fraction retained for jewelry.

“Much of what they did was calculated to preserve and enhance the prestige of the imperial court even as it was being exploited to impress, overawe, recruit, even seduce. Unlike troops or gold, prestige is not consumed when it is used, and that was a very great virtue for the Byzantines, who were always looking for economical sources of power.

“It might be said, therefore, that the loss of Syria and Egypt, unlike Latin speaking and Chalcedonian North Africa, was a mixed curse for the empire: it brought the blessing of religious harmony, and increased cultural unity.

“It is by that same logic in dynamic action and reaction that the victories of an advancing army can bring defeat once they exceed the culminating point of success, indeed victory becomes defeat by the prosaic workings of overextension.

“It starts with the simple, static contradiction of
sivis pacem para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war) and proceeds to dynamic contradictions: if you defend every foot of a perimeter, you are not defending the perimeter; if you win too completely, destroying the enemy, you make way for another; and so on.

*All excerpts have been taken from The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Edward Luttwak, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.