Total war

Total war is a type of warfare where a society's entire economy, population, and infrastructure are considered part of the war effort. It mobilizes the totality of national resources to sustain the war effort (particularly through war production), blurring the line between military and civilian segments of a society, and legitimating attacks on civilian targets as part of a war that is "unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded." Under a total war approach to armed conflict, "all aspects of the enemy—its people, its infrastructure, its economy—are legitimate [military] targets." In the mid-19th century, scholars identified what later became known as total war as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, they argued, the differentiation between combatants and civilians diminishes due to the capacity of opposing sides to consider nearly every human, including non-combatants, as resources that are used in the war effort.