Edward Luttwak, the uncontained strategist
“Christ, Edward! No!” Edward Luttwak has just lunged at me with a knife in the study of the house he shares with his wife in a suburb of obdurate anonymity near Washington, DC. He is giving an unsolicited demonstration of how to most effectively stab someone.
“Let your hand go limp, then feint a punch with your non-knife hand,” he says with gusto, his left fist fluttering around my face, “then stab into the diaphragm upwards. The air will go out of them like a balloon and they’ll drop to the floor. They may live another twenty years, but they’ll certainly be out of action for the next twenty minutes.”
The demonstration has come after a brief typology of knives for my benefit — also unsolicited. (“The butterfly knife is the only knife I use when leaving the house. It’s the only practical one, you see.”) It is the type of recondite knowledge — most of it associated with violence — that characterizes Luttwak, author, thinker and, above all, military strategist, who makes his money not so much from books but from consulting for a variety of governments and high-profile individuals…
