Asymmetric

This is an asymmetric war. In asymmetric wars, you want to pit your greatest strength against the enemy's greatest weakness. Our great strengths are our ideals and our system of justice.

As it turns out, our enemies' greatest weakness is that they are bereft of ideals. If we can maintain our ideals, our sense of justice, in the face of this, we can win. What the enemy, what the terrorists want to do -- because they know they can't beat us militarily -- [is] they can try to change us. They can cause us to become more like them, and for them, that's victory.

-- Retired Admiral John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy, speaking against indefinite military detention of US citizens as proposed in the National Defense Authorization Act, 12 December 2011