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Luttwak's how-to manual (complete with 13 tactical diagrams) charts every step of a coup, from plot to power. The average coup—once physically launched—takes about 13 hours. The whole art is to analyze all forces that might squelch the coup and, if possible, "neutralize" them beforehand. To block airborne troops, for example, a single bribed technician can silence a key radio-station or airport control tower. Capital cities can be isolated and made safe for coups by parking trucks across the airstrips that link them to the outside.
Nearby army and police units can be dangerous. The best way to disarm them is to find out which secondary commanders have been passed over for promotion. Then the most competent can be cozened (with lofty language and basic career promises) into moving against government forces.
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After a coup succeeds, the plotters must demobilize their own forces lest the commanders—a treacherous lot by definition—get ideas about a "coup-within-the-coup." The new group should then "freeze" the situation by raising army pay, promoting fellow plotters, barring any flight of refugees, and flooding the radio with calls for sacrifice to cure the alleged sins of the deposed rulers.
In Ghana, 500 soldiers out of a 10,000-man army overthrew Kwame Nkrumah's regime and hardly fired
a shot. In South Korea, a mere 3,500 men in an army of 600,000 put General Park Chung Hee in power. Luttwak's little classic explains how so few can fool so many. By revealing the necessary delicacy of timing—a single miscalculation of hours or minutes can send the plotters to their execution—he also shows how easy it is to prevent a coup. In his appendices Luttwak offers other advice for despots eager to cling to their posts. It resembles that given by one of the tyrants of ancient Greece. Asked how it was that he was never troubled by rivals, the tyrant walked into his garden and, without a word, lopped off the heads of the tallest flowers.