Diocletian's Defensive Strategy

Some archaeological evidence, particularly in the east, seems to support lutwick's theory. It has been argued persuasively that you can never say that they just wanted to sit back and wait for attack. We have ourselves just gone through campaigns on the far side of the rhine by diocletian and maximian - both undertaken to prevent possible invasion into the empire. In neither of those cases were the emperors willing to just sit back and catch the enemy in a web. And it would have been anathema to their most basic ideologies of warfare to design a system premised on a defensive posture.