Kilcullen argues that, instead of heavy-handed Western intervention, the objective should be to give local people a sense of security and reliable justice, so that they expel the jihadists with their own boosted immune system rather than implement sharia. The experience of southern Thailand, where three ethnic Malay Muslim provinces have been waging a long insurgency against rule by Bangkok's plenipotentiaries, is instructive. This local "population-centric" approach was also evident in the Anbar awakening in Iraq, where, with the encouragement of Kilcullen, some 95,000 Sunni tribesmen turned on the murderous al-Qaeda foreign fighters, after the latter insisted that religion trumped tribal custom, and that the local sheikhs, downgraded in favour of radical imams, should "give me your daughter" in marriage. This Sunni force was much larger and better wired into the local scene than the 7,000-10,000 extra combat troops, out of a total force of 30,000, whom the US inserted on the ground.

In addition to advocating picking apart the tenuous bonds that link local and transnational insurgents, Kilcullen is a firm believer in a very light Western boot-print in the Muslim world. He also argues that the West needs to rediscover the rich-picture approach that characterised the Office of Strategic Services in the Second World War. It is striking that this former SAS soldier warns against fetishising special forces as a sort of silver bullet against insurgents, lest they become like the "cosseted elites" that cavalry generals sought to protect in the First World War. One hopes that Donald Rumsfeld is reading this somewhere.

Compared with Kilcullen's thoughtful analysis of half-a-dozen well-chosen cases from countries in which he has served, the British academic Jeremy Black's War Since 1990 reads like a frenetic gallop through hundreds of conflicts which easily blur into one sanguinary vista. This encyclopaedic mania almost obscures the points Black seeks to make, namely that Western military doctrine has been too obsessed with the salvific power of revolutionary technologies, and that Western military establishments need to appreciate the ways in which warfare is conducted in much of the non-Western world.