Max Boot life and biography

Max Boot (born 1969) is an American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He has been a prominent advocate for American power. He once described his ideas as "American might to promote American ideals." He self-identifies as a conservative, once joking that "I grew up in the 1980s, when conservatism was cool". Boot worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times and he has also authored well-reviewed books of military history.

Boot is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to other publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. He blogs for Commentary Magazine on its page Contentions. He serves as a consultant to the U.S. military and as a regular lecturer at U.S. military institutions such as the Army War College and the Command and General Staff College.

Boot worked as a writer and editor for The Christian Science Monitor from 1992 to 1994. He moved to The Wall Street Journal for the next eight years. He rose from assistant op-ed editor to become op-ed editor from 1997 to 2002, while also writing many columns and editorials.

In the middle of his career with the Journal, Boot wrote Out of Order, a critique of the American legal system published by Basic Books in 1998. Robert Bork wrote the foreword to the book. Boot argued that judges have usurped the roles properly held by legislators and other government officials by doing what he sees as making law rather than interpreting law. Boot left the Journal in 2002, and he then joined the Council of Foreign Relations. He became a 'Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow' with the group. His writings with the Council appeared in several publications such as The New York Post, The Times, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune in 2002.

Boot wrote Savage Wars of Peace, a study of small wars in American history, with Basic Books in 2002. The book was named one of the best of the year by the Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. It won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history, and has been placed on Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy professional reading lists.

He published his most recent work,War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, an analysis of revolutions in military technology since 1500, in 2006. The book's central thesis is that a military succeeds when it has the dynamic, forward-looking structures and administration in place to exploit new technologies. It concludes that the U.S. military may lose its edge if it does not become flatter, less bureaucratic, and more decentralized. The book received praise from Josiah Bunting III in The New York Times, who called it "unusual and magisterial", Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain in his 2008 United States presidential election bid. He stated in an editorial in World Affairs Journal that he saw strong parallels between Theodore Roosevelt and McCain.

Boot appeared on the PBS public affairs program Charlie Rose alongside war correspondent Julian Barnes of The Wall St. Journal on August 3, 2010. During Rose's interview, Boot praised President Obama's decision to appoint General David Petraeus as the ground commander of the Afghanistan campaign and he said that the conflict is winnable. He also mentioned that he has worked extensively as a civilian adviser to both Petraeus and his predecessor Stanley McCrystal, with fellow civilians Fred Kagan and Stephen Biddle.

Author of books:

Out of Order: Arrogance, Corruption and Incompetence on the Bench (1998, nonfiction)
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002, nonfiction)
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006, nonfiction)

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