Military conflict in which the contenders mobilize all of their civilian and military resources in order to obtain a complete victory. It is distinguished from the partial commitment of lives and resources in limited war.
The modern concept of total war is traced to Carl von Clausewitz, who stressed the importance of crushing the adversary's forces in battle and described wars as tending constantly to escalate in violence toward a theoretical absolute. The classic 20th-century work is Erich Ludendorff's The Total War (1935). World Wars I and II are usually regarded as total wars. After World War II, especially during the Cold War, the prospect of an all-out nuclear war made the major powers reluctant to engage in full-scale international warfare or allow their client states to do so.
This is the complete article, containing 129 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Total war
