Boot left the Journal in 2002 to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies. His initial writings with the CFR appeared in several publications, including The New York Post, The Times, Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune. Boot wrote Savage Wars of Peace, a study of small wars in American history, with Basic Books in 2002. The title came from Kipling's poem "White Man's Burden". James A. Russell in Journal of Cold War Studies criticized the book, saying that "Boot did none of the critical research, and thus the inferences he draws from his uncritical rendition of history are essentially meaningless." Benjamin Schwarz argued in The New York Times that Boot asked the U.S. military to do a "nearly impossible task", and he criticized the book as "unrevealing". Victor Davis Hanson in History News Network gave a positive review, saying that "Boot's well-written narrative is not only fascinating reading, but didactic as well". Robert M. Cassidy in Military Review labeled it "extraordinary". Boot's book also won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best non-fiction book recently published pertaining to Marine Corps history. Boot wrote once again for the CFR in 2003 and 2004. The World Affairs Councils of America named Boot one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy" in 2004. He also worked as member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 2004. Boot published the work War Made New, 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", and criticism from Martin Sieff in The American Conservative, who called it "remarkably superficial". Boot wrote many more articles with the CFR in 2007, and he received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism that year. In an April 2007 episode of Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, Boot stated that he "used to be a journalist" and that he currently views himself purely