This is a book about power, and how common understandings about power can lead to disaster.

The term “asymmetric conflict” is meant to bracket the broad topic of inquiry in the fewest words and syllables – yet it suffers from a whiff of academic conceit and ivory tower detachment.

The real topic at hand is naked brutality.

In war the primary recipients of this brutality should be soldiers. They are trained to supply it, within limits; and they expect to be injured or killed by other soldiers in the course of their duties. But nowadays war's brutality is less and less often restricted to soldiers (some would say it is a myth that it ever was). It is perhaps an unintended consequence of the attempt to use the Geneva Conventions (and subsequent instruments of international humanitarian law) to protect infants, the injured, the sick, the mentally ill, the crippled, small children, women who do not bear arms, and the elderly, that it is precisely these human beings, and not soldiers, who have increasingly become targets of knives, rifle butts, flame, and flying metal. They are targets because desperate men find it useful to shelter behind and among them, while their enemies lack either the will or the ability to strike them without also striking say, the nine-year-old girl huddled nearby.

In asymmetric conflicts – those in which one side is possessed of overwhelming power with respect to its adversary – this is especially true.