Total war

Abstract

The two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century gave rise to a new classification of war: ‘total war’, an expression supposedly first coined in the last year of the First World War by a Frenchman, Léon Daudet, in his ‘summons to national mobilization’, La Guerre Totale.1 Such conflicts are characteristic of the age of industrial capitalism, imperialism and mass politics, and are typified by the mobilization of society’s (in practice an empire’s) full resources — economic, diplomatic, scientific, technological, and above all population — for the ‘total’ war effort. Thus, such conflicts take place both on fighting and home fronts, and the distinction between the two becomes increasingly blurred. The destruction of civilian property and morale becomes as much an objective as the defeat of the enemy’s armed forces, and victory is determined by the productivity of the industrial economy and the resilience of civilian morale as much as the size and effectiveness of the armed forces.2KeywordsGeneral StaffMilitary HistoryNational MobilizationHome FrontHigh CommandThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.