In Episode 1, we drew the line between cyber crime, cyber terrorism and cyber warfare. Of the three, cyber warfare is the one that carries the most strategic weight — and the most confusion.
Governments call things "cyber war" that scholars would call espionage. Headlines warn of a "cyber Pearl Harbor" that has never actually happened. Meanwhile, quieter operations — the ones that never make headlines — are reshaping the balance of power between nations in real time.
So what is cyber warfare, really? And why does the answer matter more for India than for almost anyone else?
A Working Definition
Strip away the jargon, and cyber warfare is this: politically motivated digital operations conducted by a state, or a group acting on a state's behalf, against another state's networks, infrastructure or information systems.
It is an extension of policy — Clausewitz's old idea that war is "policy by other means" — carried out in a new domain. The tools are different. The logic is not.
Cyber warfare can disable official websites, cripple financial systems, steal classified data, or quietly map a rival's power grid for future use. Some of it looks like sabotage. Much of it looks like nothing at all — until years later, when the pre-positioning becomes clear.
Security researcher Jeffrey Carr described it, memorably, as "the art and science of fighting without fighting." That phrase borrows directly from Sun Tzu — and that borrowing is not an accident. To understand cyber warfare, it helps to look at three much older ways of thinking about conflict.
Three Lenses on War
Every strategist who has tried to make sense of cyber conflict has reached, consciously or not, for one of three classical frameworks.
Figure 1. Three strategic traditions, each offering a different way to read cyber conflict.
Clausewitz insisted that war requires organised violence — force used to compel an enemy to submit. By this standard, most cyber operations fall short: no blood, no wreckage, no formal declaration.
Sun Tzu took the opposite view centuries earlier. The highest form of warfare, he argued, is to "subdue the enemy without fighting" — through deception, foreknowledge and espionage. He devoted an entire chapter of The Art of War to spies. In digital form, that foreknowledge now comes from network intrusion rather than human informants.
Kautilya, writing the Arthashastra in India around 300 BCE, went further still. He described three forms of warfare: open war (prakasha yuddha), concealed war (kutayuddha), and silent war (tushnim yuddha) — the last involving secret agents, misinformation and covert action against a rival state, conducted so quietly that the target may not even know it is under attack.
Cyber warfare, as practised today, looks far less like Clausewitz's battlefield and far more like Kautilya's silent war. It is a technological continuation of a very old idea, not an unprecedented invention.
The Rid–Kello Debate: Is It Really "War"?
Two contemporary scholars capture the modern version of this same disagreement.
Thomas Rid, in Cyber War Will Not Take Place, argues that no cyber operation to date meets the classical definition of war. Without lethal force and physical destruction, he contends, what we call "cyber war" is really espionage, sabotage or subversion wearing a dramatic label.
Lucas Kello disagrees. In The Virtual Weapon and International Order, he argues that judging cyber conflict purely by physical violence misses the point entirely. He coins the term "unpeace" — a persistent state of strategic rivalry, conducted through cyberspace, that is neither full war nor genuine peace. Repeated intrusions into power grids, defence networks and government databases, Kello argues, can shift the balance of power between nations without a single shot fired.
Digital Arthashastra Insight
"Rid is right that cyber war rarely produces immediate destruction. Kello is right that its cumulative effects can quietly rewrite the balance of power. India lives inside that gap."
Why This Matters More for India
Along both its western and northern borders, India does not experience declared war. It experiences something closer to Kello's "unpeace" — a sustained condition of pressure, probing and calibrated disruption that rarely crosses into open conflict.
State-linked activity attributed to actors such as RedEcho has been associated with reconnaissance of Indian power infrastructure. Groups such as APT36 (Transparent Tribe), linked to Pakistan-based operations, have focused on sustained espionage, credential harvesting and profiling of Indian defence personnel. Neither pattern looks like war in the Clausewitzian sense. Both look exactly like Kautilya's silent war, and both are consistent with Kello's unpeace.
This is not a coincidence. Kautilya's own strategic worldview — the mandala theory, which treats neighbouring states as natural rivals — maps closely onto India's position between two nuclear-armed neighbours with unresolved territorial disputes. Ancient strategic geography did not disappear in the digital age. It simply found a new domain to operate in.
The Takeaway
Cyber warfare is not a futuristic abstraction, and it is not science fiction. It is the modern expression of a form of conflict that Sun Tzu and Kautilya were already describing more than two thousand years ago: advantage sought through information, deception and patience rather than open battle.
Key Takeaway: Whether or not a given cyber operation meets Rid's strict definition of "war," it can still meet Kello's threshold of strategically consequential "unpeace" — and for India, that distinction is not academic. It shapes how threats should be detected, attributed and deterred.
In the next episode, we turn to a related but distinct threat: Cyber Terrorism — what happens when the objective shifts from strategic advantage to psychological fear, and why treating it identically to cyber warfare leads to the wrong response.
Digital Arthashastra is a research-driven platform on cyber warfare, cyber terrorism, national security and the future of conflict. Follow along on YouTube, LinkedIn, X and Instagram.
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