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The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire<\/strong><\/a> A quarter century in the making, eminent and controversial strategist Dr. Edward Luttwak<\/strong> has produced a tour de force work of scholarship\u00a0that illuminates the little known (to laymen)\u00a0\u00a0military and diplomatic vision of the Byzantine Empire while making a case for adopting some of Byzantium’s strategic posture to adapt to the challenges of today. A book intended to provoke as much as inform the reader, Luttwak’s epilogue, “Conclusion:Grand Strategy and the Byzantine ‘Operational Code”, which synthesizes the best elements of leading schools of strategic thought, is so good that it\u00a0merits a separate printing of it’s own.<\/p>\n Luttwak’s central idea is that the Hellenic and holy Orthodox\u00a0Byzantines, who forever saw themselves as “the Romans”, abandoned the grand strategic posture of the Roman Empire whose mighty legions were optimized to smash heavy infantry into the enemy, seeking not just a decisive victory, but the total destruction of the enemy. Facing a sophisticated peer rival in Persia and the endless steppes that vomited up unending waves of invading Huns, Avars, Pechnegs, Slavs, Bulghars, Bulgars, Turks\u00a0and Mongols, eventually menaced by an ideologically motivated Islamic enemy, the Byzantines sought to conserve their strength by avoiding decisive battle.<\/p>\n As the position of the Empire meant that one destroyed enemy might be replaced by a worse successor, the Byzantines crafted a grand strategy that maximized stratregic alternatives to wars of attrition that the small, highly trained, well-armed, tactically versatile and irreplaceably expensive Byzantine army could ill afford. Diplomacy, espionage, bribery, assassination, recruitment of foreign proxies, strategic raiding, naval supremacy, manuver warfare and cunning strategems\u00a0were all employed in preference to engaging in decisive battle. Today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s ally was a foremost consideration for the Byzantines, who took great care to lay down\u00a0hard-won military\u00a0wisdom in handbooks and\u00a0manuals like The Strategikon<\/strong><\/em> or\u00a0 De Re Strategica<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n Strengths and Weaknesses:<\/strong><\/p>\n Where you sit in reading The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire<\/strong> is likely to determine where you stand on it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Luttwak has written a very interesting\u00a0book about a historical subfield in which he himself is not an expert but has infused it with distillations of professional\u00a0insight regarding strategy and warfare\u00a0that no Byzantinist scholar and\u00a0only very\u00a0few military historians could have brought to bear. And importantly, never have tried to do so. Luttwak’s commentary on each of the surviving Byzantine military manuals, some only recently translated,\u00a0for example, while repetitive for a lay reader is an important service for\u00a0students of war and military strategy.<\/p>\n The empire lasted an exceedingly long period of time, as the Byzantines themselves\u00a0reckoned it, from the 8th century BC to 1453 when the last Emperor Constantine\u00a0died heroically fighting the final onslaught of the Ottoman Turks<\/strong> a mere 39 years before Christopher Columbus<\/strong> discovered the New World.\u00a0 Luttwak is not a historian and makes no attempt to approach the subject as a historian would – something that might require multiple volumes or a very superficial treatment – and makes selections from Byzantine history to illustrate thematic points regarding strategy or, as with the digressions on the composite recurve bow and training of mounted archers, the complex\u00a0relationship between technology, economics, military tactics and strategy.\u00a0 To the reader interested in strategy and military history, Luttwak’s approach is efficient and sensible; for those interested in a comprehensive understanding of the Byzantines it makes for a highly idiosyncratic reading.<\/p>\n Nor does Luttwak make any pretense of bowing to\u00a0rhetorical academic conventions. He does not soften his language anywhere, referring for example to the later wars between the Empire and Arab potentates as “jihad” and “crusade” and draws clear connections between the wars of Byzantium and the wars today with al Qaida<\/strong>, the Taliban<\/strong> and Iraq or the continuity between old\u00a0 Persia and Ahmadinejad’s<\/strong> Iran.\u00a0Luttwak freely\u00a0injects modern terminology into archaic subjects and generally writes as he pleases, meandering whenever details of a topic interest him. His endnotes though, are a rich source of further commentary and observations and the bibliography runs for an additional\u00a0seventeen pages.<\/p>\n Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire\u00a0by Edward Luttwak A quarter century in the making, eminent and controversial strategist Dr. Edward Luttwak has produced a tour de force work of scholarship\u00a0that illuminates the little known (to laymen)\u00a0\u00a0military and diplomatic vision of the Byzantine Empire while making a case for adopting some of Byzantium’s strategic posture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,46,414,420,133,586,51,78,336,39,445,481,127,530,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-analytic","category-ancient-history","category-authors","category-book","category-dime","category-history","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-military","category-reading","category-strategist","category-strategy","category-strategy-and-war","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=zenpundit-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0674035194\")