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Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present Hardcover – Deckle Edge, January 15, 2013
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As fitting for the twenty-first century as von Clausewitz’s On War was in its own time, Invisible Armies is a complete global history of guerrilla uprisings through the ages.
Beginning with the first insurgencies in the ancient world―when Alexander the Great discovered that fleet nomads were harder to defeat than massive conventional armies―Max Boot, best-selling author and military advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan, masterfully guides us from the Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire up through the horrors of the French-Indochina War and the shadowy, post-9/11 battlefields of today. Relying on a diverse cast of unforgettable characters―not only Mao and Che but also the legendary Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, the archaeologist-turned–military commander T. E. Lawrence, and the “Quiet American” Edward Lansdale, among others―Boot explodes everything we thought we knew about unconventional combat. The result is both an enthralling read and our most important work on nontraditional warfare. 70 illustrations; 8 maps- Print length784 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLiveright
- Publication dateJanuary 15, 2013
- Dimensions6.7 x 2 x 9.6 inches
- ISBN-100871404249
- ISBN-13978-0871404244
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
― Steve Forbes, Forbes Magazine
"A sweeping panorama that ranges over a vast terrain... thoughtful, smart, fluent, with an eye for the good story."
― Mark Mazover, New York Times Book Review, Front Page Review
"Max Boot has written a landmark book about a perennial and important challenge: guerilla warfare."
― Jon Meacham, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
"A penetrating writer and thinker."
― Wall Street Journal
"Fascinating. . . . Beginning with the barbarians at the gates of the Roman Empire, a wonderful and valuable historic narrative filled with colorful characters."
― Walter Isaacson
"[D]estined to be the classic account of what may be the oldest as well as the hardest form of war."
― John Nagl, The Wall Street Journal
"This is the definitive treatment of guerrilla warfare through the ages―a tour de force by a preeminent military historian who has advised generals, policymakers and political leaders on the subject."
― Senator John S. McCain
"An expansive nuts-and-bolts historical survey from a keen military mind."
― Kirkus Reviews
"...[I]mpressively researched, astutely synthesized, and eminently readable."
― Booklist
"The word “magisterial” is bandied about far too freely these days, but in the case of Max Boot’s sweeping and deeply researched history of guerrilla warfare, it proves fair. Somewhere in the first third of Boot’s book, you begin to realize that guerrilla wars (and terrorism and insurgencies) are the way we fight, while the formal set battles of, say, the Napoleonic wars are but an exception."
― Lucas Wittmann, The Daily Beast
"For the historian and journalist Max Boot to use the phrase ‘an epic history’ in the subtitle of his own book implies a magnificent lack of modesty in his own capabilities. The work more than matches the hype…. This pathbreaking book should thus be on the reading list of every NATO officer hoping to defeat an insurgency."
― Andrew Roberts, Commentary
"Invisible Armies’ is a magisterial account of insurgency and counterinsurgency across the ages, peppered with fascinating personalities such as Robert the Bruce, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Che Guevara, Edward Lansdale, Osama bin Laden and David Petraeus. Out of narrative emerges cogent analysis: The author offers important insights relevant to any modern power faced with a guerrilla opponent. Hard lessons are, however, delivered with elegant prose. Leaving aside what Invisible Armies teaches us, this is a wonderful read."
― Gerard DeGroot, Washington Post
"Max Boot’s alternative military history is so marvelously readable because every section―and there are many in this epic of 750 pages―is moved along by a vividly pictured zealot, mass murderer, mini-murderer, tactician, partisan, general, king―as well as the weary survivors of battles, wars, massacres, atrocities."
― Manueala Hoelterhoff, Business Week
"There’s no better guide to both the past and the future than Invisible Armies, the tour de force of a scholar as well as a man who’s seen American adversaries and soldiers at work up close."
― The Weekly Standard
"In his encyclopedic history of guerrilla warfare, Max Boot, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes a crucial observation: that [guerrilla warfare] has been a far more enduring feature of conflict than many realize… [An] important survey…. Nicely drawn portraits of the leading figures in the insurgents’ pantheon―Giuseppe Garibaldi, T.E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, Mao Zedong."
― James Blitz, Financial Times
"Lively.... A timely reminder to politicians and generals of the hard-earned lessons of history."
― The Economist
"Max Boot is an ideal guide to offer such a timely and, in some ways, reassuring history of guerilla warfare.... A considerable achievement that will ensure Invisible Armies remains a valuable scholarly research tool as well as popular history…. Boot is concerned with neither a morality tale nor politics, but in conducting a disinterested examination of a method of war that is still poorly understood, yet increasingly relevant to our own security…. Boot’s formal findings may startle…. [A] magisterial study."
― Victor Davis Hanson, The New Criterion
"Boot is an elegant writer …. Invisible Armies is a timely book."
― Mackubin Thomas Owens, National Review
"Enormous, brilliant, and important...should be required reading in the White House and Pentagon.... Lucid, enlightening, and highly readable."
― Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
"[B]rilliantly sums up the lessons of the centuries."
― Martin Walker, The Wilson Quarterly
"[C]ool and balanced."
― John Gray, The New Statesman
"[A] rich and enthralling history of guerrilla warfare."
― Jay Winik, author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval
"A magisterial overview of insurgency and counterinsurgency, peppered with fascinating personalities. The author counts 442 insurgencies since the American Revolution, 25.2 percent of which were successful."
― Gerard DeGroot, Washington Post
"Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace, presents an astutely synthesized account of insurgency and counterinsurgency through the ages―from the Peloponnesian War to the post-Sept. 11 battlefields of today.”"
― Ihsan Taylor, New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Liveright; First Edition (January 15, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 784 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0871404249
- ISBN-13 : 978-0871404244
- Item Weight : 2.81 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.7 x 2 x 9.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #535,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,356 in Engineering (Books)
- #49,713 in History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Max Boot is a bestselling author, historian, and policy analyst who has been called one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is a columnist for the Washington Post, a global affairs analyst for CNN, and the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers "The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam" and "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present." His other books include the widely acclaimed: "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power" and "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today." He has been called "a master historian" by the New York Times and a "a penetrating writer and thinker" by The Wall Street Journal. For more information, see www.maxboot.net.
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The media libs started the propaganda up again during the Iraq War of 2001-2008 only to be proven abysmally wrong when the Iraqi guerilla movement suddenly folded under the "surge" of General Petraeus after wreaking a firestorm of terror for several years.
Because we Americans have our own revolutionary heritage of guerilla war in evicting the British from our territory, we like to imagine that guerilla movements are popular uprisings against oppression. We glorify the guerilla movements that succeed and forget the ones that fail. This often leads the left-leaning among our citizens to conclude that we are wrong by definition when WE are the power that fights guerillas.
We also tend to give guerilla warfare more credit than it is due.
We remember that American guerillas succeeded in freeing the American South from British occupation in the Revolution, but forget that Confederate guerillas entirely failed to break the Union's hold on the South in the Civil War. We remember that Castro's communist guerilla insurgency prevailed in Cuba, but forget that communist guerillas were defeated in every other country in our hemisphere, including our own Puerto Rico. We remember that Communist guerillas broke the will to fight of the French and later the Americans in Vietnam, but forget that the British colonial administrations quashed similar guerillas in most other de-colonializing Asian countries that went on to become anti-Communist and pro-Western. We remember the guerilla-like tactics of Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" character, but forget that the true end of Scotland's William Wallace was to be drawn and quartered by the victorious English and his dismembered body parts placed on display in a travelling circus.
Thus, it is important to de-romanticize guerilla movements and make clear that they come in all kinds. Some are noble, some are evil. Some win, some lose. Author Max Boot EDUCATES US TO THIS UNDERSTANDING by providing a synopsis of 64 episodes in the history of guerilla warfare --- from the dawn of civilization to the present.
A book this broad is by definition going to be hit-and-miss. Some of the early chapters are recaps of familiar history: Romans vs. Barbarians and U.S. Cavalry vs. Indians.
The chapters on the Vietnam War are excellent, but the book by its broad-based nature doesn't have room to expound upon them in great depth. Nevertheless it does cover the BASICS of our war against the Communist guerillas in South Vietnam, and explains why the effort went awry at an early date. I have to give kudos to Boot, who I believe leans to the right politically, for giving an absolutely objective account of our war in Vietnam, including an analysis of mistakes made by our generals. The only problem here is that the scope of the book naturally limits the amount of discussion that can be given to the Vietnam War.
The book was in general not as American-centric as I would have preferred. Nothing is said about General Winfield Scott's remarkable pacification of Mexican guerillas during the Mexican War. Likewise, not enough of substance is said about the suppression of Confederate guerillas during our Civil War. There is too much digression into John Brown's miniscule raid and the after-the-war Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps not enough is said about the Philippine-American war of 1899-1908 in which the American expeditionary army defeated a well-organized native Filipino insurgency in the northern islands and then defeated and pacified a Muslim insurgency in the southern islands. Nothing is said about the pacification of the incipient guerilla war in Puerto Rico in the 1940s and 1950s.
Likewise, some recent topics of nearby interest, such as the 40-year guerilla war in Colombia, are glossed over. This was a classic multi-faceted guerilla war in the planets' most guerilla-friendly terrain that was finally defeated by cooperation between Colombia and the USA. Or what about neighboring Mexico's contemporary war against the drug mafias? Is that a guerilla conflict against well-armed insurgents or a judicial process?
However, the book does give a good account of Fidel Castro's overthrow of the Batista Government in Cuba by guerilla tactics. It points out that Castro was a small-time operator whose tiny force succeeded because of Castro's sheer force of character and because the Batista government was a vacuous government that existed in name only. It likewise provides an enthralling description of legendary guerilla leader "Che" Guevera --- an even more forceful character than Fidel Castro, who was killed fighting the Bolivian government. This chapter proves that even the most legendary guerillas face long odds. Few die of natural causes.
The chapter I most liked was the inspiring story of how General Petraeus' leadership of "The Surge" turned a seemingly lost war against the Iraqi guerillas into a successful outcome:
=================
More conventionally minded soldiers harrumphed that Petraeus was turning soldiers into social workers, but that criticism was far off the mark. The number of insurgents killed or locked up soared in 2007 (U.S. forces wound up detaining 27,000 Iraqis) but without generating the popular backlash that had accompanied offensive action earlier in the war. The difference was that now troops living in Iraqi neighborhoods were able to gain tips from the populace that allowed them to pinpoint insurgents and avoid the sort of counterproductive roundups of young males that had occurred in years past.
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Max Boot does a fine job of covering a wide variety of guerilla war topics. He accomplishes his purpose of demystifying and de-emotionalizing guerilla warfare. Guerilla wars are shown to be common, not necessarily noble, and usually losing --- but winning enough times to encourage disaffected populations to keep waging them.
The critique is that in a book this broad-based it is to be expected that some topics will not be of interest to every reader. I was not much interested in the ancient history of guerilla warfare, nor of the contemporary Palestinian Uprising, of which I have heard way more than I want to already. However, that's just my personal preference. Other readers may enjoy these topics. I also think that people who aren't military history buffs and haven't encountered these topics before will find them more interesting than those who are already familiar with them.
A casual reader of history, and especially one who has not much studied guerilla warfare, is likely to thoroughly enjoy every aspect of this book. A military history buff will probably want to cherry pick it. Cherry-picking IS a great way to digest the book because each chapter can be understood independently. Among the wide variety of topics covered, I think most readers will find that enough are interesting to make the book well worthwhile their read.
"Invisible Armies" is far from the epic history its subtitle immodestly claims for itself. Instead, it is another tired narrative rehashing mostly Western military actions from 1762 to 2011 centered around colonial policing, with a dash of Biblical references to the Israelites unconnected with the issues at hand sprinkled among about half the chapters in a similar manner, though not as pervasively, as Martin Van Creveld in "Transformation of War" (1991). Interestingly, Van Creveld used a similarly uninspired self-approbation in the subtitle to his own equally dissatisfying book, calling it "the most radical approach to war since Clausewitz," a statement matched only in its hubris by its inaccuracy.
The tired parallels to past works are not limited to the poorly cited authors from whom Boot borrows for his book. Compare the case studies presented in the similar but much shorter "Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits" (2011) by John Arquilla. The reader will notice Boot has somehow even copied the order in which Arquilla presented his cases. For example, note how Boot's treatment of T.E. Lawrence, followed by Ord Wingate, and then Tito matches the exact order Arquilla presented them four years before Boot's "epic history." It does not stop there. In all, Boot rehashes more than half of the case studies Arquilla presented, and in nearly the same order and focusing on the same "great," i.e. Western, men. Interestingly, Arquilla is not credited in Boot's bibliography.
Boot's approach to research, writing, and analysis is inappropriate for a military study of the magnitude he believes he has achieved. Boot takes the "great men" approach common in popular histories but worthless in historical analysis of war, which is comprised of contingent events, path-dependent conditions, and grand strategy. In fact, he paints a picture of thieving bandits at the periphery of great empires, staring jealously into the civilized cities they'll soon pillage just as soon as they adjust their loincloths or finish praying at the mosque. If this sounds ridiculous, look at the first image plate he presents in the book, captioned "Tribal warriors were the original guerrillas." One notes the spears and loincloths followed shortly by a plate of the Powhatan Indians, also featuring loincloths but this time eschewing spears for daggers. Between these plates, we see the dashing Italian Garibaldi, captioned "one of the first guerrillas to become an international celebrity and sex symbol." Furthermore, his writing wallows in the muck and mire of tactics, of which he has no experience or training, never rising to the level of strategy, operational art, or theory.
Boot never attempts to explain why irregular forces may be fighting. In fact, he claims irregulars never fought for a cause until after 1789. He further claims ideology and "public opinion" are novel concepts and are only used as a weapon. The logical gymnastics he undertakes to sew his narrative together make the reader cringe while Karl Popper rolls over in his grave. Instead of analyzing causes and framing cases, Boot contents himself with taking the reader on frequent and meandering narrative side roads to make straw man attacks against the historical figures with whom he seems to take issue. This is the same sophomoric and unhelpful writing style one sees in works like Michael Burleigh's equally poorly written "Blood & Rage" (2008). Boot notes three different cases of rumored homosexuality among the characters he describes and also devotes more words on the page to describe the sexual appetites of Garibaldi and Bin Laden than he does to acknowledge that he might be wrong to claim Al Qaida in Iraq was defeated in 2008. In fact, he devotes zero words to the latter factual problem.
Boot embraces the magnetic pull to tactics at the expense of strategy and history common among colonial police literature of the last century, such as Roger Trinquier, David Galula, and Charles Calwell. The book falls far short from the long-dated Western colonial treatments of the subject he lauds, such as the US Marine Corps "Small Wars Manual" (1941) and Frank Osanka's "Modern Guerrilla Warfare" (1962). His tactical myopia, further complicated by the fact that he has never actually practiced anything he has written about, would not be so problematic if he was not so influential with actual tacticians and practitioners of war.












