Boot presents an unoriginal, biased, and poorly structured narrative of stories already told. His writing lacks rigor, eschews analysis, and sinks early on into a restrictive and poorly informed view of history in his 2014 book "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present." Besides the distracting comparisons of Akkad and Nazi Germany invoked nearly a dozen times in the work or the factual inaccuracies in many of his cases, the book contains no new information and is basically an expanded annotated bibliography of authors who said it better. In fact, this book is so reflective of the narratives it parrots that if its 750 pages were to be put through an originality checker like Turnitin, it would probably not be allowed for submission due to the number of quotations and borrowed structure permeating the book.
"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.
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