Invisible Armies.

• Author: Abrahamson, James
• Position: Book review

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present by Max Boot, Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, 2013, ISBN 978-0-87140-424-4, i-xxix, 750 pp., Hardcover, $35.00; paperback; $18.95; Kindle $13.75.

Had Invisible Armies appeared ten years earlier, before the 2006 publication of the U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Max Boot's magnificent book with its almost six hundred pages of text and its appendix, endnotes, bibliography, and index, running to almost two hundred more, might well have been seen as providing the historical underpinning for the Manual's recommendations for countering guerrillas and terrorists.

Both those terms, as descriptions for groups that fight from the shadows against more powerful but not always successful opponents, entered common usage only two centuries ago. They describe military skills as old as mankind's hit-and-run tribal conflicts. Only with the emergence, some five thousand years ago, of agriculture and empires thereby able to employ full-time warriors in their defense did regular warfare between trained cohorts emerge. Even so, groups too poor or too small to engage in battles between massed forces persisted, using "invisible armies" to wage traditional irregular warfare and sometimes succeeded in bringing down apparently more powerful opponents, as was the fate of Akkad in 2190 BC, overthrown by fierce tribesmen from the Mesopotamian mountains.

In sixty-four chapters organized into eight books, Boot reveals the history of such warfare, addresses the emergence of terrorism, explains the growing importance of propaganda and ideology, and accounts for the winners and losers. In so doing he explains the fate of those who succeeded Alexander the Great, the empire sustained for centuries by Rome's legions, and those who shaped the formation of China and many modern societies. He also describes the ways that new ideas--national, liberal, anarchist, radical, religious--enabled insurgents to challenge, often successfully, powerful empires all across the globe.

Boot also covers insurgent invaders, like Mongols and Turks, who occupied Europe and the Middle East, the home-grown irregulars who supported the American Revolution, the Spanish guerrillas who fought Napoleon's best, as well as the methods of South Africa's Boers, the IRA, Mao Zedong, and Vo Nguyen Giap.

Nor does the author neglect the fact that regular armies sometimes formed their own...