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The conflicts which contributed to the rise of the concept of total war can be understood as helping to shape both the conditions under which warfare between states happened, and restructuring the organisational basis of national militaries. These conflicts ranged from the Napoleonic wars, the American civil war, the wars of German unification and both world wars with each producing effects which were not only experienced, but became systemised and codified within the growing bureaucratic approach to organisational systems. This adaptation was primarily due to technological innovation, industrialisation, nationalisim and representative politics with each enabling the engagement of a larger percentage of a civilian population already stratifying from alterations to the division of labour. The concentration of industry within urban areas also guaranteed a domestic industrial base which intersected across all levels of society. In this sense these urban-industrial complexes and the social power they commanded would be key to achieving levels of national mobilisation and allowing an industrialised division of labour to reach maturity. While there is no doubt that new systems and ideas allowed an encompassing totality we must ask if total war was a truly new endeavour ? Did it constitute a break from the our military pasts ? or was it rather an adaptation of older methodolgies, which were simply expanded due to an ability to maximise exisrting military power within a newly globalised state system whose relationships had always erred towards extremes.

In 2010 Jeremy Black published “the age of total war 1860- 1945), in it he suggested that Total War had become “one of the defining concepts of the modern age”1 This period in particular spanning 85 years encompassed conflicts which can be considered as the pre-cursors of the 20th century world wars. Black was then at the end of a long list of authors who had over the previous two centuries dealt with and attempted to form a coherent narrative about a paradigm of which as Black himself stated “there was no consensus” 2 In tackling the subject Black was in esteemed company with historians such as G. N. Clark (1950’s) Arthur Marwick (1965) Gordon Wright (1968) Peter Calvocaressi and Guy Wint (1972) Martin Van Creveld, John Keegan, Ian Beckett and the renowned Hew Strachan also penned works which attempted to describe the relationships which arose between military organisations their political directors and the extension of warfare within industrialised societies. Each of these scholars built upon the same foundations using the nineteenth and twentieth century, pointing to earlier conflicts of totality such as the American civil war, the Franco Prussian war and several Balkan wars leading up to the first world war. These conflicts stand it is suggested as representative of the growth and extension of conflict into the public sphere. Warfare in becoming an industry drew in public participation, to support such massive military commitments society was mobilised. The effects of this militarisation were pointed to by Arthur Marwick. Marwick who understood total war as providing a testing experience for the institutions of the state 3 as well as social bonds and solcial solidarity. Other authors such as Roger Chickering attempted to both define total war and to explain the process of what he called totalisation. Each of these interpretations help to highlight that as far as academia was concerned the industrial age finally fully enveloped national conflicts in a way that had not been seen prior to 1789 when the French revolution signalled the rise of populism and nationalism creating the nations under arms. Ever since this departure socially the role of society became far more connected to military strength. But as suggested by Blacks periodisation the years 1789 -1860 laid the groundwork for the next 85 years.

In the American civil war the campaigns of Sherman and Sheridan highlighted that by attacking the industrial base of a nation and causing a population pain and suffering it would be possible to either break their will to resist or remove the ability of military organisations to sustain themselves. Clearly by the time of the first world war the development of totality which included mass armies and nation wide conscription, mass firepower creating large fire swept battlefields was experienced at the front and in the rear by civilian populations. Many French citizens were taken hostage by German forces and the disruption to the French who lost industrial areas was on a scale which penetrated the furthest reaches of French society. The naval blockade suffered by Germany without doubt impacted its home front and civilians ability to maintain integrity. The ability though to extend violence during 1914-1918 to urban civilian areas was limited by both technology and geography and while civilian ships were sunk by submarines and Zeppelin dirigibles bombed Britain their impact was limited. This would change in World War two but the concept of totality could still not be said to be all encompassing for every combatant. The United States were able to fight on multiple fronts but due to its geographic location and sheer industrial capacity its population was never threatened. The British experience suggested more totality as did the Japanese and the German in terms of civilian casualties and the targeting of war industries. Nevertheless totality as a concept, had very clearly become subsumed into an academic debate concerning methods, effects and in Marwick’s deluge the transformational power of warfare on modern society 4 But as Black stated in our opening there has of yet not been a consensus as to what a definition of total war should look like. 

There are though steady benchmarks or indicators of the total war concept which are firmly agreed upon. Some of these, such as the conditions of labour within heavy and light industry can be identified as improving during periods of large scale conflict, while the participation of women within industry and white collar employment has been used by Beckett and Marwick to show the wider effects of total war on societies. These effects became central due to the level of combat between massed armies and the need to arm, cloth and feed millions of soldiers while providing healthcare alongside socio-economic organisational improvements. As such civilian industries were re-tooled to produce literally thousands of vehicles planes tanks and ships to prosecute war across multiple battlefronts. All of these indicators do suggest that warfare underwent massive expansion and that this expansion brought more societies and civilians into a realm where they would be considered legitimate targets. But the targeting of civilians had been a trend well before the age of total war and if we use the periodisation of Black from 1860 -1945, we will find that civilians have not only been considered targets before and after this date range, but that industries and societies have in a relative sense been involved in supporting conflict and suffering from its effects.

If we look back to the days prior to the nation state and consider the ancient world we will find societies such as the Spartans enslaving the Helots while the Roman’s also carried off entire populations. Our own European ancestors wiped out Maori and Aborigines while the Spanish and Portuguese decimated meso-American populations. Even the emergence of the United States was born upon the destruction of native Amerindians and conglicts with the old world. Clearly then the concept of total war cannot be seen solely a modern phenomena, as a subjective physical experience it had clear pre-cursors. Without doubt its modern iteration did extend further into civilian life in developed nations but it had always been a part of the experience of people facing violent conflict. Perhaps why no consensus exists as to a description of total war is due to the fact that total war does not exist in such a binary form, rather it is a multi axial description which has been constructed within an escalatory frameworks to describe organised violence within societies, and also as an umbrella term for the escalatory effects of warfare as it evolves alongside the growth of human populations.

As pointed in a past article written about Rupert Smith’s the utility of force, warfare is an expanding continuum whose main features can be found in every age but at a relative scale. At times it was the sheer length and breadth of fighting during the twentieth century which pointed to the existence of a specific total war concept but as we have seen limited war, industrial war, asymmetric war, civil war and social war co-exist within the same paradigmatic framework and in this sense total war is simply an occurrence when all of these conflict typologies arise simultaneously. Even Nuclear war: which provides a destructive force so powerful that it is hard to imagine, sits within this framework. And while Nuclear war can be said to be equal to Clausewitz’s concept of absolute war 5 this is only because Clausewitz suggested that if combatants could, they would use all the force and weapons at their disposal at one place and time to secure victory. This though was deemed impossible and the absolute concept gave way to real war comprising successive and telling blows under the annihilation characteristics of the wars which Clausewitz had experienced. Clearly then post Napoleonic thought had more to do with the growth of the mass wars of the 20th century from which the modern concept of total war can be seen as an outgrowth. The modern structure which followed this period has also allowed the concept of total war to fade away hence historians now like Black feel comfortable to suggest it existed within a specific period and context with a definitive start and end date. This does not suggest that the nation-state acts as a break upon any conflict framework with many conflicts including the targeting of civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate. If we look at what we can call post modern conflicts acts in this sense are not considered within the total war thesis.  But as we have seen in Russia, the Ukraine and Israel the same indicators of action appear.  These indicators point to a totality within what have been termed limited conflicts highlighting that the characteristics of total war are clearly illustrated.

In this sense then total war as an effect on individuals and groups can be said to exist as both an objective and subjective experience. Gazans would state that they feel as if war has encompassed them in totality. The same cannot be said of Israeli citizens. In the Ukraine will find a similar experience as people flee their homes, for them there is evidence of totality and in the same sense this happens for soldiers engaged in continual daily combat. Reflecting on this subjective experience what we find is that warfare is experienced at different levels and that these interactions fo exhibit totality. This is why the term total war can be expanded with a recognition that it acts on the strata of a pre existing conflict framework, and that framework is entrenched within an escalatory process rather than being a defined typological state which can be attributed to a particular period..

In essence the age of total war has nto ended it is a transitional and evolutionary process with a logical pathway through human periodisation. The defining characteristics of total war were mass armies, ideology and the introduction of modern industry, but there was also industry before this period based around smaller scale cottage industries. Modern warfare then was the result of the leading edge of social-types and norms being reshaped alongside the introduction of wider economic organisation. This relates closely to the post-modern worlds experience of technological hybridity following the introduction of the microprocessor industry to conflict. The proliferation of DNS attacks on servers, drone warfare, the use of smart bombs and other hi-tech weaponization can be substituted for these earlier descriptors. Like all typologies in the pre, modern, modern and post modern total war exists within these conjunctures ready to shift as a non static entity which leverages itself into a range of sub-typologies. This is why we cannot say (as many did following the fall of the Soviet Union) that industrial warfare is obsolete or that coalition warfare will replace single states fighting each other. Warfare then defies periodisation and simple classification, it exists rather as a system of escalation which depending on the characteristics of the combatants can exhibit any number of styles individually or simultaneously.. .