Dr. Edward Luttwak is an American author and strategist born in Romania and raised primarily in Italy. The author of numerous books on geopolitics, economics, military theory, and history, Luttwak earned a degree from the London School of Economics and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Coup D’etat, published when he was 26 while he was working as a consultant in London, was an international bestseller and inspired the subsequent 1972 coup attempt in Morocco. His other works include Turbo-Capitalism, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, and Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. Luttwak has worked as a consultant for the White House, the National Security Council, and various branches of the US military. He has also advised multinational energy firms, among other clients. He has served in both the British and Israeli armed forces.

I sat down with Luttwak to discuss the post-heroic era of history, innovation and military procurement, and the decline of democratic politics. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

CB: With so much happening in the world, where should we begin?

EL: I suggest one thing that is on my mind. A phenomenon that exists all over Europe in a very powerful way, and beyond Europe, in many other countries — one that nobody talks about. The post-heroic era. It is a phenomenon that hits you in the face the moment you think about it. In certain parts of the world, such as Europe, the whole territory of which was always fragmented into different states. In other parts of the world, such a large territory became one empire — like China or even India, for the Mughal Empire, and in the Middle East the Ottoman Empire. Most of these territories historically were not under the control of small states. Only Europe was divided into small, quarrelsome states. The only big state was Russia, and Russia was not present in most episodes of European history until very late, under Peter the Great.

These Europeans became small, quarrelsome states that had wars every 20 years, and those wars resulted in people dying. When the war ended, the warriors returned, and the warriors wanted women. The women wanted warriors. They didn’t want to marry these stay-at-home guys. And the more dynamic people who came back from the war — they picked up a few things, and then they would make more children than the number that died in the previous war. So the demographic machinery of Europe was: fight the war, have people killed, and many more babies are born. Second, much of Europe, Northern Europe, was built entirely of wood. Every time there was a war, entire cities would disappear in fire and flame, and then they rebuilt twice what had been there before. So the whole engine of European civilization was war — and that’s why there was a timing to it. Every 20 years it was time for a war.

There were exceptions — for example, Napoleon. Napoleon was so excessive in fighting all these wars, and when he finished with the wars, he came back once again, with Waterloo, once again when he was already defeated. Because of that extreme amount of warfare, there was no real war until 1870 — and even that was isolated — Franco-Prussian. But otherwise, then you went back in the 20th century to the normal rhythm, a war every 20 years. At the end of every war, there was a huge upsurge of the economy, and then a second one from the children growing up. A demographic push — more people, more people. The last time it happened was 1945, and people did not realize this had happened all through history. So they invented special words, like the German Wirtschaftswunder, economic miracle.

The Italians had their own. The French said les trente glorieuses, the glorious 30 years after ‘45, when the economy was growing and growing — and then, of course, it stops. It stops after 1975. 30 years later, European economies started not growing. What’s happened is this. In the 19th century, when you had proper military service — organized and everything — a 15-year-old boy started thinking of the day when he would go into the army, when he would get his rifle. And once he gets his rifle and his training, he thinks of the next day: that is when you go on campaign. That word is from the same Latin root as Champagne. You leave the barracks and you start marching through the open country, and it has to begin in springtime, because there are many horses, and they have to have grass. So as you’re marching, eventually you’re marching with golden wheat growing next to you. That is how Europe lived until 1945. That war was a huge war, did a lot of damage — and somebody invented nuclear weapons. That interrupted the machinery. There was enough energy left over in 1945 – the Wirtschaftswunder miracle, and there were babies. The birth rate exploded. All these people came back.

The Germans lost so many soldiers killed, but there was still a birth rate increase. The French had prisoners during the war. They came back. They made children. Italians, everywhere — there was a big bump in births. That meant that 20 years later — now we’re in 1965, you had lots of young people entering the labor force, and they all got jobs. Okay? Now, what happened is that suddenly the machinery was taken out, the engine was taken out of Europe. What is the last fertility number for American females?

CB: It was below two, I believe.

EL: Once it’s below two, it means your population is shrinking and getting older. I’ve been a military contractor all my life — a military advisor, military planner, and a combatant, fighter. I was in different wars and so on, different wars for governments. I was in the British army first, and then the Israeli army, but also as a contractor. What’s happened — this is my hypothesis — is that the reason so many very different kinds of people, very different cultures, have lost any desire to fight in any war for any reason is fertility. It is as if the wars of European history were all fought by the spare male child that a woman would have. Normally four children. Normally there would be two boys. If one of those boys dies, the family continues. That is my personal theory, which I advance to explain the fact that suddenly, everywhere in the world, they don’t want to fight. Now, meanwhile, we have military institutions that assume the opposite. In fact, NATO is huge. The sum total of all NATO personnel is 3.5 million. They boast another 3 to 4 million reservists, which means they have many more people than Russia, many more people than China. The whole PLA is 2 million.

CB: The rate of innovation seems to have declined. When you look at the period prior to World War II, for example — the North American Aviation Corporation could put together a prototype of the P-51 in 100 days. It took Lockheed 48 hours to come up with a new bomber design that the British RAF had requested, the blueprints drawn from nothing.

EL: This still happens in Israel.

CB: What happened to innovation, and how do you bring it back? How do you accelerate innovation?

EL: What’s your surname?

CB: Becker.

EL: German. So, tovarish, Becker, everything has to do with the structures of capitalism. You’re mentioning a company called Lockheed. Who do you think started Lockheed?

CB: The Lockheed brothers.

EL: Exactly. And Northrop was started by Jack Northrop. So aviation companies were set up by people who loved airplanes, whose only modus operandi was to quickly build a prototype, fly it, and try to fiddle with it. Over time, the aircraft pioneers were replaced — naturally, because their work became Northrop Corporation, Lockheed Corporation, and so on. But something else happened. The engineers were demoted more and more and more, because the companies were run by financial analysts, by lawyers, by political lobbyists. The engineers counted for less and less. The maximum of this phenomenon was Boeing, and they got to the point where they couldn’t build airplanes. Boeing went into a complete dive, and only then did they bring back somebody who understood the company. They were not delivering aircraft — and I don’t mean aircraft for some poor people in Afghanistan. Not to the President. The presidential airplane was not delivered.

The Israelis ordered tankers from Boeing in 1981. The first one was delivered the next week. In other words: first they got rid of the engineers. Then everything became the logic of a contract. Now, what’s the virtue of a contract? The virtue of a contract is that it should last forever — 20 years, 25 years. That’s why there’s enthusiasm right now in Europe — because they’re getting extra money, 5% of GDP, for defense. And immediately, what do the aircraft people do? They do multinational programs.

For example, there’s this project — the British and Italians and the Japanese are supposed to develop a fighter aircraft. This enables the project to last 25 years. I mean, the F-35 is a good airplane. Israelis use it and everything else. But it took them 20 years to develop. Now, once you are developing an aircraft over more than four years, five years, all the microprocessors change. So every computer element has to be changed. You have to stop, go back to the beginning, take out all the subsystems — this box, that box, and so on. It’s a sociological change. Why did that happen?

Selling airplanes used to work like this. You make a prototype, you and your brother. Then you call an Air Force General, and you say, “Joe, I have a plane.” And the guy says, “If I fly it, will it crash immediately, or only later?” And then the general would come and fly the airplane. And then he goes back and tells the other generals, “this flies really good.” And then they say, “Okay, we’ll give you a contract for a few prototypes.” They would work day and night and they would make it. Now it is an elaborate corporate process, and it is so willed, so desired, so wanted by the United States Congress, which passes the laws under which they write regulations. They only produce a few hundred laws, only a few hundred, but the regulations are many thousands.

CB: It reminds me a bit of the Ukrainian procurement model, which occurs at the battalion level, as opposed to the ministerial level.

EL: This is the Israeli army. Everything the Israeli Army Corps acquires is acquired by the officers of the army corps — that includes the 65-metric-ton infantry combat vehicle, the heaviest vehicle in the world. You know, 65 tons, and it has no turret. No turret because it’s an infantry combat vehicle. So it’s actually more armor, and I rode it through the Gaza Strip during the fighting. And you see everything from screens inside the vehicle. You don’t have slits and any of that. The secret is the people who use the weapons, the people who fly the airplane, are the ones buying the airplane — not officials, lawyers, lobbyists, acquisition specialists and purchase specialists and selling specialists and marketing people. If you don’t remove all these barriers between the designer and the user, you’re going to end up with the end of aviation — the F-35 is very close to it. It took 20 years to develop a very normal airplane with stealth. And the value of stealth is so little these days that the last purchase was the F-35 — where you sacrifice speed, range for stealth — and they also bought the F-15, which has no stealth at all. The US Air Force order last time was an equal number of stealth and non-stealth. Why? Because stealth is not important. Have you ever been to war?

CB: No.

EL: I’ve been in war, and the most important thing in war is that nobody should see you. And of course, you don’t go there and start to advertise yourself by sound. What radars do is advertise. Some years ago, in 1972, the Israelis started working on an anti-radar drone, the cost of which was maybe one or two percent of the cost of the cheapest radar in the world. And that drone just flies around. When the radar touches it, it goes to the source of the radar.

CB: Because of Yom Kippur, right? The Arab armies were equipped with Soviet SAMs.

EL: In the 1973 war, the Yom Kippur war, the Russian Air Defense Organization — PVO strany, it was called — was composed of very serious people who responded to American air superiority by making it a whole separate service. And they developed everything. By 1973 they had a missile, the SAM-6, that was really a good missile. They shot down many Israeli aircraft, so the Israelis decided they had to have a countermeasure for every anti-aircraft missile, not just SAM-6. The SAM-5, for example, has a range of 250 kilometers. You can be in Damascus and shoot down an airplane over Tel Aviv. And that was my Mongolia trip. That’s how I got to see Mongolia. SAM-5. So anyway…

Now, the contrary story, which will be very short: I’ve decided that the Marines cannot reach the Chinese island bases along the coast — they have no way to reach them. If the Marines could reach these bases, a company of Marines — force recon or just regular Marines — would come there and kill all these Chinese soldiers, take over the island, because they’d come by surprise. The Chinese have been on watch every year, every day, every night — but now they’d come by surprise. They would definitely take them. But how the hell do they get there? How will the Marines get there? The Osprey aircraft they developed — the multi-plane aircraft — has a huge radar cross section. It would be seen, even shot down — no chance of making it.

However, when I told that to the then-Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger, he said to me, “Edward, we don’t care whether it can be shot down or not shot down, because we can’t get them out of the garage. They’re so complicated that they don’t fight, and we have to work a week to get them out” — in effect. The vulnerability of the Osprey doesn’t interest me, because they can’t fly. So I said, “So what are you going to do?” He said we commissioned very small landing vessels, which the Naval Sea Systems Command is supposed to deliver for us, to carry an infantry company — 100 men — a small boat, fast, open boat for landing. And I said, “What happened?” He said, “They’re not doing it. They instead offered us the medium landing boat. The small boat they promised in three years, the medium takes seven years, and the medium is bigger, more easily seen.” And I said, “You give me three Marines and we will go to the headquarters and force them to give you the boat you actually need.” He said, “Oh, if I do that, they won’t give me anything” — in other words.

I had a brilliant idea: a submarine, purely electrically powered. Every submarine configuration, if you look at it, has a big engine — and there’s a space below the engine, I don’t know what’s used for. And then there’s a big engine that occupies the main part of the hull. Then there’s a forward part, the sonar, and so on. I would have no engine at all, because all these engines end in an electrical motor. They always generate electricity. That’s how it’s done, because if you use a mechanical transmission, it’s too noisy, right? So it’s an electrical motor. I say: keep the electrical motor, take everything else out, and I feed the electrical motor with lithium batteries. After the landing, you pop up a cable from the submarine, and the ship comes and recharges it. So we have a hull. We have no engine in it, only the original electrical motor at the very end. It occupies a very small space. 100 Marines fit very nicely there. Below them are the batteries. And then I evolved the idea and put the batteries between the pressure hull and the outer hull. Cylindrical lithium batteries.

I had been unable to present it to the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps refused to receive the design. Everybody in the Marine Corps knows me — they’d say, “We have to come through proper channels.” And what is the proper channel? It’s that the Lockheed guy, who is ex-Marine Corps and left last year, calls the current guy and makes the appointment. They refused to see the project. By now Commandant Berger, who started everything, has moved on. When I called Berger to arrange an appointment for me — he’s the former commandant now — I just wanted to present my idea. I paid my own money to have a fully engineered design. It’s simple engineering. Berger says, “yes, if I call, you will definitely get an appointment, and you’ll get it tomorrow morning. And the person you get an appointment with will then not do anything. And if he tries to do anything, it will fail, because procurement channels are separate.” That’s the Commandant of the Marine Corps.

That is how you get no innovation. If you want to strangle innovation, adopt the current American system. In fact, the United States government should give free briefings to explain the American procurement system to the world — because if they copy it, it will be so much easier.

CB: What should be done about the F-47, the Next Generation Air Dominance program, and the B-21 Raider, our next generation stealth bomber?

EL: I think they’re wonderful aircraft and very beautiful, and they should make them in plastic and sell them in toy shops. But they could also make some in metal, for hobbyists or people who want something more serious. As for combat aircraft — forget it, because the sheer complexity of them is sufficient to make production a slow process. During that slow process, everything electronic will change. So either they ignore that — imagine that you get an aircraft today with the electronics of 1970 or something like that — and things are moving really fast, so it’s absolutely not possible to do it.

You can’t start with the paper project. You must start with a prototype. The airplane is what made America a great power. I once had a very well-paid contract to study intelligence before World War II, Japanese, German, Italian, French, British. The Italians won, totally. Not slightly better — totally better. Now, who were the Italian intelligence officers? There were two infantry colonels who had no particular education in intelligence or background in intelligence. They got the job because the Italian Army, hierarchically, was superior to the new Air Force and the Navy — so they got a job, and the Italian Army had no particular interest in intelligence at all. For them, it was not a big issue. They’re defending the Alps, or they’re in Ethiopia. Either way, it’s a matter of practicality — of knowing the countryside. To fight in the Alps you need an excellent map.

So these two guys are asked the following question by Mussolini in January 1940: who will win the war? Because Mussolini wanted to be in the war; he wanted to know who would win the war. And the answer was: the United States will win the war. At that time, the isolationists were in control, so the army was very small, there was no money. That’s how they wrote the analysis. Americans live on two different coasts of a broad continent; therefore, to do anything, they have to fly. In Europe and other places, very few people fly. In America, the mail goes by air. Everybody has to fly. Therefore, the Americans have something like 30 aircraft companies, and they’re all different, and so on. And therefore, if the Americans get involved in the war, they will produce huge bombers and will flatten German cities. It doesn’t matter how clever German generals are at maneuvering and outmaneuvering because every German city will burn. They actually said “flat” — it was the British who invented the incendiaries. Many German cities were made of wood. And therefore: Mussolini, don’t enter the war — because even if the Germans are winning the first year, the second year, the third year, the end of the war is the destruction of every German city. Now, these infantry officers were not equipped with sophisticated intelligence methods to then say, “Oh, well, of course, there’d be a surprise, there’d be a political shock,”— to make a scenario to explain how the country that lives on two sides of a faraway continent will become involved in this European war.

They also said the Americans have aluminum. They have plenty of electrical power to make aluminum, and they have many interesting designers. There are so many different aircraft, so it took a whole layer of mistakes to lose all that, because the F-35 is a very poor aircraft. It’s not supersonic, it’s not fast, it’s not big, doesn’t have the range or the capacity, and it has everything for stealth — and stealth doesn’t matter, because you can knock out every damn radar the first day with cheap drones. The Israeli anti-radar drone is as old as your grandmother. The Harpy. It was one of the first things they did. It’s like 30 years old. It flies around, and radar paints it — as it’s called, “painting” — and it destroys everything.

CB: Do you still own the cattle ranch in Bolivia?

EL: I sold it last year because neither my son nor my daughter wanted to take it on. And there has to be an owner. In Bolivia, the ownership is the owner, not a piece of paper. You don’t go to court in the Amazon. But I love doing it. I love cows. I now understand Hinduism; sitting there in the evening, slowly the light is fading, and suddenly — hundreds and hundreds of cows walking, following a leader, who is another cow, down to the lake to drink water. Complete silence, hundreds of cows moving. You don’t hear anything, because of the grass…

CB: We have a $200 trillion, approximately, global debt burden. And I wonder what might happen if we were to have a margin call of some kind.

EL: The American debt is American politicians giving more gifts to their supporters than the taxpayer will pay for — and instead, you print the bond, and you sell it to foreigners. The American debt was not due to a war, not due to a famine, not due to a disaster. No, it was to give gifts to people. The man who first explained democracy, contemporary democracy, parliamentary democracy, was an Englishman called Walter Bagehot. He wrote The English Constitution in the 1870s. Universal voting was introduced in England with the 1870 reform, and Walter Bagehot wrote: every common man can now vote and decide who is the prime minister. That’s fine. That’s very good, but one day, they will discover that they can use the vote to compel the government to give them money, which the government will do by printing money. When that happens, it will lead to the end of democracy. It’s only a question of time. Bagehot is one of the great political thinkers. He predicted modern America. We did not have a disaster, a catastrophe, a monsoon. It was simply politicians giving more money to the electorate than they collected in taxes. That’s their idea of being generous.

CB: When do we have our Caesar moment in America?

EL: When the democratic system falls, there is Caesar. Well, it’s not Donald Trump. You know why I know it’s not Donald Trump? Because when he wants to say that many people were killed, he uses the word “decimate” — and Caesar would know that to decimate means killing one out of 10. There’s a female spokesman at DoW who will say, “we decimated.” This is the thing that annoys me, personally, much more than anything else: using the term decimate to mean killing many when it actually means killing few. You ask when is our Caesar moment. When does democracy break down and Caesar arrive? And the answer is: there are competing Caesars. We now have political figures who claim the status. But Caesar means that the military are plausible. I’m going to present you with a little issue, young man: in a post-heroic era, there is no Caesar.

Who are the real, proper heroes of our time? They are exactly people like Musk and Thiel and so on — the mega innovators. Obviously, it’s been years and years and years that they did anything to be rich. Being rich is not important for them. To make decisions that cost them hundreds of millions of dollars is no problem. They don’t respect money. Think of Julius Caesar — if the Roman legions had all become pacifists, which is the case with most people in uniform worldwide. Military service is not connected with war anymore, even in the United States. To have Caesar, you need a victorious war. And they don’t want to fight, and they definitely don’t want victory. Victory is a dirty word. I wrote a book — one of my books that you have overlooked in your carelessness — is called The Meaning of Victory. And I wrote it years ago to reintroduce the concept of victory, because America was fighting its wars merely to reach a settlement.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.