You will not find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, but “cyberwar” made its first inauspicious appearance in 1987 when an anonymous editor from Omni—Bob Guccione’s other magazine—attached the neologism as a title for an article by Owen Davies, an Omni editor. Although he never used the word or developed the idea of cyberwar, Davies pretty much nailed the coming of robotic warfare.

But something was in the air. In 1987 and avant la lettre, cyberwar in the narrow sense of an attack by malicious code on a computer system, communications network, or critical infrastructure, had a more plausible debut as the “Jerusalem virus” aka the “PLO virus,” a logic bomb that would pop up on any given Friday the 13th. Top that, Jason.

The next recorded use of “cyberwar” was in 1991. A young academic steeped in too much William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, after watching way too much of the 24/7 coverage of the first Iraq war, delivered a paper at the Second Annual Cyberspace Conference in Santa Cruz California: “Cyberwar, Videogames and the Gulf War.” Shortly afterward he was asked by the short-lived PBS television show Late City to distill the 100-hour TV war into a two-minute video buzz clip (set to Sweet Bird of Truth by The The). He gave the concept its first definition: “a new virtual and consensual reality, the first cyberwar, in the sense of a technologically generated, televisually linked and strategically gamed form of violence.”

Both were promptly forgotten. I took some solace in Nietzsche, who said only that which has no history can be defined.

But then history responded with a vengeance: Just about every major war since Iraq had a cyber edge to it. To be sure, acts of primal if not always organized violence would continue—all too often in the name of creation myths that would not be out of place in the Stone or Bronze ages—on a daily basis by and against tribes, nations, and superpowers.

Many of these acts of organized violence continue to fit the classical definitions presented early in the 19th century by the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, who variously defined war as a duel on a larger scale, a forceful act to compel others to do our will, and a continuation of politics by other means. The contemporary landscape of world politics is littered with casus belli that would not be unfamiliar to Clausewitz, or for that matter, to his eminent precursors like Machiavelli and Hobbes, who identified wars of gain (produced by imperial, economic, and military struggles for dominance), wars of fear (prompted by perceptions of a rising power or threatening evil), and wars of doctrine (caused by the clash of monolithic faiths and universalist ideologies).

But Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other non- and wannabe-state actors keep crashing the Westphalian system. Today’s new warriors intent on challenging the state’s monopoly on violence—like the insurgent, jihadist, or private militia—are not that far removed from their earlier counterparts, like the pirate, mercenary, and holy crusader. Even the guerre du jour of “hybrid war,” the corrosive mix of private criminality, public bellicosity, and authoritarian politics that scars the residual borders of the Cold War, has more than a hint of the medieval in the interplay of overlapping sovereignties, polymorphous combatants, and clashing cosmologies.

As long as global violence remains a viable, sometimes the only option in the face of intractable political differences, social injustices, and cultural struggles for recognition, war in one form or another will find a way. States, democratic or not, might be less inclined to initiate violence, but non-, para-, and anti-state actors have proven to be willing as well as able to use networked technology to wage asymmetric warfare—which in turn prompts over-reactions by states and furthers cycles of mimetic violence.

Classical war persists, as does the effort by new actors to offset disadvantages through new technologies. Even Clausewitz, ever the dialectician, acknowledged that “every age had its own peculiar forms of war, its own restrictive conditions, and its own prejudices.”

What is most peculiar about war in a “cyber age?” Depending on whether one goes back to the Greek (kubernētēs or “steersman”), Norbert Weiner (“cybernetics,” 1948), or William Gibson (“cyberspace,” 1984), “cyber” suggests everything from a control system with a feedback capacity, to a technologically-induced consensual hallucination, to a 400-pound hacker (pace Trump) subverting the U.S. elections.

Dating the cyber age is no easier. Someday archeologists will sift through the ruins of Bell Labs, find wire etchings in germanium and silicon and declare 1947, give or take a year, as point zero, from which microprocessors, packet switches, and fiber optics as well as digital code, information theory, and networked systems soon followed.

However, science will not capture the ghost in the machine. For that, we best go back to the originating myths. Cyber is, literally, as old as the Bible and other holy texts in which gods “steer” or “govern” the universe. In the Judeo-Christian version, those “who have no direction (kubernēsis) fall like leaves” (Proverbs 11:14); those who prosper understand that “with strategic planning (meta kubernēseōs) war is conducted” (Proverbs 24:6). Leaping a millennia or two forward, our techno-deities might not be as omniscient or omnipotent as past gods; but, weaponized and sanctioned by national security, they deter, disrupt, and if necessary destroy our enemies with relative impunity to us. Obama got religion, ordering 10 times the number of drone attacks executed by Bush; barely two months in office, President Trump increased them by another 432% over Obama.

Perhaps the most peculiar characteristic of war in a cyber age is how well it resists the traditional restrictions of warfare. As everything and everyone becomes connected, it’s very hard to confine cyberwar to a discrete place or bounded time. A few clicks, several thousand shares, and an incident escalates from a local to regional to international crisis. This is the force-multiplier effect of the cyber age, with 9/11 as the most seminal and inspirational example. Access to the internet and flight simulators made it possible for Osama bin Laden and 19 kamikaze fanatics to topple the World Trade Center, hit the Pentagon, kill nearly 3,000 people, and cause billions of dollars in damages (trillions if we include second-order effects, like the Iraq War and the rise of ISIS).

If there is a prejudice to war in the cyber age, it can be found in the conceit that virtualization makes war more virtuous. Rather than resorting to the convention of bombs, the United States and Israel inserted the Stuxnet virus to degrade the Iranian nuclear weapon program; no matter that the virus proved to be less than a precise munition and rapidly spread to non-targeted industrial platforms. Wikileaks hacked thousands of embassy cables to make U.S. diplomacy more transparent and democratic; no matter the collateral damage done to alliances and coalition efforts to restrain anti-democratic regimes. Drones pursue a cleaner kill; no matter the virtual terror induced upon whole populations.

Thirty years on, I think it is safe to say that we have not seen the worst of war in the cyber age. With so many networked actors operating simultaneously across multiple levels of power, prediction, pre-emption, or restriction of cyberwar is exceptionally difficult. Distinguishing intentional from accidental acts is hard. Knock-on effects will grow.

The cyber advantage might now go to the most technologically advanced powers, but the law of uneven development gives latecomers the edge. Which is why we should be asking now, before rather than after the Owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, what war will look like in the quantum age.

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While Donald Trump at first denied that the Russian intervention had occurred at all and still denies that it had any impact on the election, its significance can be judged from the fact that during the last month of the campaign he mentioned WikiLeaks at virtually every stop. In an election decided by just 70,000 votes in three states, it is hard to dismiss the possibility that the Russian intervention could, in fact, have tilted the outcome. That would make this the most consequential computer hack in history, but was it an act of war?

Certainly not in the classic sense. The Kremlin did not, after all, transgress America’s borders or the borders of an ally the United States is pledged to protect. It did not shoot down an American aircraft or sink an American ship. Those are the classic kinds of casus belli that have traditionally sparked hostilities. But such old-fashioned definitions of aggression do not seem fully adequate to deal with the cyber age, in which computers can be a far more potent weapon of war than a machine gun or a mortar.

Protesters stand around the statue of a Red Army soldier to prevent the Estonian government’s plan to move the Soviet-era monument honoring in Tallinn, April 22, 2007. The statue was subsequently removed, and Russian hackers are suspected of having temporarily disabled Estonia’s access to the internet with denial-of-service attacks in retaliation. Photo by NIPA, Timur Nisametdinov/Associated Press.

How should one treat incidents such as the one that occurred in 2007 when Russian hackers are suspected of having temporarily disabled Estonia’s access to the Internet with denial-of-service attacks in retaliation for the removal of a statue in Tallinn honoring World War II Soviet soldiers? Or the 2010 Stuxnet virus used by Israeli and U.S. intelligence to disable a thousand Iranian centrifuges? Or the 2012 attack, blamed on Iran, which disabled 30,000 computers belonging to the Saudi state oil company? Or the 2014 North Korean attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for the release of a movie parodying North Korea? As the Harvard strategist Joseph Nye notes in the journal International Security, these events, and others like them, do not fall neatly into “the classic duality between war and peace,” occurring instead in a “gray zone” that defies an easy definition or response.

It is possible, to be sure, to imagine more severe cyberattacks that would more easily cross the threshold of open hostilities. “Talk of a ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ first appeared in the 1990s,” Nye notes. “Since then, there have been warnings that hackers could contaminate the water supply, disrupt the financial system, and send airplanes on collision courses. In 2012 Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta cautioned that attackers could ‘shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.’” If such a massive attack were to occur—and if responsibility for it could be attributed with a high degree of certainty—one could imagine treating that as a casus belli requiring a response not just with computer viruses but with actual firepower.

But attacks such as Putin’s hacking of the 2016 election fall below that threshold, which is part of what makes them so attractive to relatively weak states such as Russia or North Korea: It allows them to maximize their ability to disrupt their enemies while minimizing the backlash. In fact, what consequence has Russia suffered for intervening in the U.S. election? Nothing beyond the expulsion of a few diplomats, which is hardly enough to make Putin rethink the efficacy of these tactics. Indeed, even the impact of those last-minute Obama sanctions was probably undermined by the conversations that Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, secretly had with the Russian ambassador prior to the inauguration—talks in which he is suspected to have asked Putin to hold off on any retaliation in the expectation that once Trump became president he would ease tensions. Flynn subsequently had to resign after lying about those conversations. But even the growing Kremlin-gate scandal has not been enough to dissuade Putin from meddling in similar fashion in the Dutch, French, and German elections to support pro-Russian and anti-EU candidates.

While no one is suggesting that the U.S. should have started World War III over the Russian interference in our election, a more serious response was in order. It’s not hard to think of a range of appropriate responses: As I have suggested before, Obama could have asked the NSA to disclose embarrassing communications between Putin and his aides or details about all of the billions they are suspected of looting. Or he could have simply asked the NSA to fry Kremlin computer networks. A range of non-cyber responses could also have been entertained, such as providing arms to Ukraine to defend itself from Russian aggression or ratcheting up sanctions on Russia by kicking it out of the SWIFT system of inter-bank transfers. Of course now that Trump is president, there is scant hope of any response at all; the only issue is whether Trump will lift existing sanctions on Russia.

Obama hesitated to do more against Putin because every action carried the risk of unintended consequences and of sparking greater hostilities. But the greatest risk of all is relative inaction. By failing to respond more strongly to Russia’s election intervention, the U.S. risks legitimizing such “gray zone” attacks. Thus we can expect more of them in the future. They may not exactly be “acts of war,” but they can cause more damage than many kinetic attacks—and it can be much harder to know how to respond. Figuring out a doctrine of cyber war that includes everything from such low-level strikes to “cyber Pearl Harbors” will be one of the signal challenges for military and intelligence strategists in the 21st century.

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