A Review of Max Boot's Latest

I like Max Boot even though I don't think I agree with him that often. Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power was one of the most enjoyable reads in Foreign Policy yet I disagreed with it's idealist sentiment wholeheartedly. The New York Review of Books takes a look at his latest - War Made New and walks away unimpressed. Here is the closing paragraph:

Overall, I feel that Boot's focus on four separate and distinct military revolutions since 1500 is misleading. Change is pervasive and continual. Fixing on a few periods and aspects of military innovation, as he does, imposes far too tight a corset on the sprawling confusion of human affairs. By schematizing his story so drastically, he minimizes surprises and almost entirely overlooks the larger human setting—moral and intellectual as well as social and economic—within which wars are fought. Professional fighting men are not wholly autonomous and the perpetual social flux within which they, like everyone else, actually exist needs always to be taken into account when trying to understand their victories and defeats.