[1] Luttwak was born into a Jewish[2] family in Arad, Romania that fled Soviet occupation after World War II.

[3] In 1968, when he was 26 and working in London as a consultant for the oil industry, he published the book Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, a pastiche of a military manual.

The book explains in detail how to overthrow the government of a state, looking in particular at coups d'état on the African continent and in the Middle East.

[4][5] Earlier, during a two-month visit to Washington, D.C. in 1969, Luttwak and Richard Perle, his former roommate in London, joined a thinktank, the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defence Policy, assembled by Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze to lobby Congress for anti-ballistic missile systems.

[1][6] In late 1974 and into 1975 a series of articles was published by neoconservative intellectuals discussing whether the US military should seize the oilfields in Saudi Arabia.

In March 1975, Harper's Magazine published an article that Luttwak had written under the pseudonym "Miles Ignotus" with the title "Seizing Arab Oil".

Luttwak had previously published the gist of his argument on how to break Arab power under the title "Obsolescent Elites", using his real name, in The Times Literary Supplement.

"[1] Luttwak has said that he has used Akira Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai to train men to fight in war, including villagers in El Salvador.

He forecast that it would lead inevitably to a military occupation of Iraq from which the United States would be unable to disengage without disastrous foreign policy consequences.

[21] Luttwak predicted in a 2016 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration would pursue a foreign policy "unlikely to deviate from standard conservative norms", withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, avoiding involvement in Syria and Libya, eschewing trade wars, and modestly reducing spending — in short, "changes at the margin".

His Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (1983) was the first English-language text that recognized the different nationalities that were re-emerging in the USSR and were ignored by both "Kremlinologists" and U.S. intelligence.

He reasoned that when confronted with weapons of mass destruction, statecraft needed a grand strategy, that is, "the firm subordination of tactical priorities, material ideals, and warlike instincts to political goals".

For Luttwak, grand strategy was no longer a military doctrine, but a political issue, and diplomacy was needed to achieve the security of the state.

[25] Writing in 2007 for the National Review, former George W. Bush's speechwriter David Frum said of Luttwak: "His book on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire was terrific, and his Coup d'État is that astounding thing: a great work of political science that is also a hilarious satire.

[2] Several of his books as listed below have also been published in other English-language editions in the UK, US, and India, and in foreign languages: Arabic, Bahasa, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Bahasa Indonesia, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (and Brazilian Portuguese), Romanian, Russian, Spanish (in Spain, Argentina and Venezuela), Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.