With cyberstrikes—invisible, deniable—the temptation to conduct preventive war may be higher than it has ever been before. Unsurprisingly, few government officials want to delve too deeply, at least in public, into how the laws of war apply to offensive cyber action. In private they debate these issues constantly. But as Robert Litt, the former general counsel to the director of national intelligence during the Obama years, put it to me one day: “There is no issue on which government lawyers have spent more time, to less productive effect, than on the question of how the laws of war apply to
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