Max Boot is one of America’s leading military historians and foreign-policy analysts. The Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Max Boot is also a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and other publications.

Max Boot is now finishing Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, which will be released by W.W. Norton & Co. in January 2013.

Max Boot's last book,War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (Gotham Books, 2006), has been hailed as a “magisterial survey of technology and war” by the New York Times and “brilliantly crafted history” by The Wall Street Journal.

Max Boot's previous book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic Books) was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by numerous newspapers, 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. More than 100,000 copies of his books are in print.

Max Boot has served as an adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2007-2008 and is currently serving as a defense policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Max Boot is a frequent public speaker and guest on radio and television news programs, both at home and abroad. He has lectured on behalf of the U.S. State Department and at many military institutions, including the Army, Navy, and Air War Colleges, the Australian Defense College, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School, and West Point.

In 2004, Max Boot was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of “the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy.” In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, given annually to a writer who exhibits "love of country and its democratic institutions" and "bears witness to the evils of totalitarianism."

Before joining the Council in 2002, Max Boot spent eight years as a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the last five years as op-ed editor. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at The Christian Science Monitor.

Max Boot holds a Bachelor’s degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley (1991), and a Master’s degree in history from Yale University (1992). He was born in Russia, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives with his family in the New York area.