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Following the seminal terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the USA’s subsequent challenges in dealing with the threat of global terrorism and jihadist-inspired insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a great deal of soul-searching. The critical self-examination that followed eventually led to the revised US Army Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual which was released in December 2006.1 This was accompanied by a new National Defense Strategy overseen by Robert Gates in June 2008.2 Both documents complement each other as they support a new strategy in dealing with insurgency and global terrorism. Essentially, this sought to replace the previous emphasis on the kinetic application of military force with a comprehensive strategy encompassing military, political, economic, social and information warfare instruments, in the context of an integrated, collaborative and multilateral approach. The objective is to gain legitimacy through the winning over of the hearts and minds of the Muslim community, where the true centre of gravity in the war on terror lies. The new strategy acknowledged that ultimately, only the Muslim community could effectively marginalize and contain the extremists in its midst. As General David Petraeus observed in Iraq in mid-2008, the US ‘cannot kill our way out of this endeavour’. Instead, the goal is to ‘identify and separate the ‘reconcilables’ from the ‘irreconcilables’ through engagement, population control measures, information operations, kinetic operations, and political activities ... we must strive to make the reconcilables a part of the solution’