total war

total war, military conflict in which the contenders are willing to make any sacrifice in lives and other resources to obtain a complete victory, as distinguished from limited war. Throughout history, limitations on the scope of warfare have been more economic and social than political. Simple territorial aggrandizement has not, for the most part, brought about total commitments to war. The most deadly conflicts have been fought on ideological grounds in revolutions and civil and religious wars.

The modern concept of total war can be traced to the writings of the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who denied that wars could be fought by laws. In his major work Vom Kriege (On War), he rejected the limited objectives of 18th-century warfare, in which winning local military victories was regarded as the key to advantageous diplomatic bargaining, and described wars as tending constantly to escalate in violence toward a theoretical absolute. Clausewitz also stressed the importance of crushing the adversary’s forces in battle. His 19th-century admirers tended to overlook his insistence that the conduct of war must be strictly controlled by attainable political objectives.

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The classic 20th-century work on total war was Erich Ludendorff’s Der totale Krieg (1935; The “Total” War), based on the author’s experience in directing Germany’s war effort in World War I. He envisaged total mobilization of manpower and resources for war. The country at war would be led by a supreme military commander, and strategy would dictate policy. The concept of total war moved geography and economics into prominent positions in Nazi thinking. The two World Wars of the 20th century are usually regarded as total or at least the most total of history’s wars, although they were, of course, limited in numerous ways.

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World Wars

After World War II, especially during the Cold War, the prospect of all-out nuclear war raised a conceptual problem in that such a war presumably would short-circuit the processes of all-out mobilization of resources and regimentation of national effort—that is, the very mobilization and regimentation that had made the World Wars seem more total than earlier ones. The fear of nuclear war, in any case, severely inhibited the major powers in waging wars themselves and in allowing their client states to do so, thus substituting deliberate restraint for the more impersonal constraints that limited warfare in the past.

Among smaller powers the fear of nuclear war has had little restrictive effect; most wars between small countries since 1945 have been limited. This has not been universally true, however. During the Vietnam War (1954–75), the communist leadership of North Vietnam regarded the conflict as one of total war and acted accordingly. The Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), though fought with limited resources in that neither side had a large industrial base or much airpower, was very close to a total war for both belligerents.