Welcome back to the Deep Dive. If you're joining
us today, we know exactly who you are. Yeah,
you are the learner. Exactly. You're the kind
of person who wants to cut through the endless
noise out there. You want to get straight to
the core of complex topics. And you want to do
it without feeling completely overwhelmed by
just an avalanche of information. Right. Well,
you were in the right place. Today, We are pointing
our lens at a massive, incredibly weighty concept.
We're using a really extensive Wikipedia historical
overview as our foundation here. Yeah, we're
looking at the history, the evolution and the
Honestly, chilling reality of total war. It's
intense. Very. Our mission for this deep dive
is to explore how human warfare evolved. We are
tracking a very specific shift, you know. Right,
how humanity moved from these isolated battlefield
skirmishes. Where armies just fought out in a
field while the rest of the civilian world mostly
just watched. Yeah, moving from that into these
all -consuming, just cataclysmic events that
swallow entire society's economies and populations
whole. OK, let's unpack this because it is a
dark topic, undeniably. Oh, absolutely. But what
I find so deeply compelling and honestly a bit
surprising is how this incredibly destructive
concept actually drove some of the most massive
societal and technological leaps in human history.
Yeah, it's a huge paradox. So to understand how
we got there, we first have to define what we're
actually talking about. Because when historians
use the term total war, they aren't just talking
about a really big battle. Right. It's not just
fighting really hard. No, it's a specific phenomena
that fundamentally blurs the line between the
military and the civilian. It's the absolute
mobilization of all national resources. Every
single one. And it completely disregards the
established laws of war, removing traditional
restrictions. on combatants, weapons, and territory.
What's fascinating here is the academic framework
used to really dissect this, because there's
a scholar named Stig Förster who breaks total
war down into four distinct dimensions. OK, let's
hear it. First, you have total purposes. These
are what historians call hegemonic visions. Let's
break that down for a second. What does a hegemonic
vision actually look like in practice? So. Think
of it like a game of Monopoly, where you aren't
just trying to win the game, you are trying to
own the entire board, flip the table, and make
sure nobody else can even play. Oh, wow. Yeah,
it's the aim of continuously growing your power
to absolutely dominate your neighbors. Then the
second dimension is total methods. Meaning rival
countries end up adopting similar ruthless tactics
just to survive against each other. Exactly.
They basically mirror each other's brutality.
It's a race to the bottom. It really is. And
the third dimension is total mobilization. This
is a massive shift. It means pulling in people
who are traditionally entirely outside the armed
forces. But not just soldiers. Right. We were
talking about women, children, and the elderly
being drafted into the war machine in various
capacities. That's intense. And the fourth. The
fourth is total control. This is where you see
dictators or oligarchs centralizing their power
across multiple sectors. Like a total takeover.
Exactly. They take cross -functional control
over education, culture, media, the economy,
and politics. Everything serves the state and
the war effort. And then there's a fifth dimension
added by another scholar, Tiziano Petya. He calls
it total change. I love his description of this.
It's so good. He says, total war is an earthquake
that has the world as its epicenter. Yeah. It
doesn't just impact who wins or loses the fight
on a map. It fundamentally and permanently alters
the post -conflict culture, the politics, and
the technology of the societies involved. It
completely rewires the world that comes after
the war. You can't put the genie back in the
bottle. You really can't. And when you look at
the actual grim realities on the ground, the
specific tactics of total war, it is chilling.
Truly. You see strategic bombing of cities, scorched
earth policies, where retreating armies their
own land so the enemy can't use it. Right, unrestricted
submarine warfare, collective punishment. Forced
labor and the brutal policy of giving no quarter,
meaning taking absolutely no prisoners. It is
the absolute suspension of humanity in the pursuit
of victory. So where does this come from? Because
the actual phrase total war is relatively new.
Yeah, it was coined by a French writer, Léon
Dada, in 1918. And then it was heavily popularized
by a German general, Erich Ludendorff, in his
1935 memoir, literally titled Der Totale Krieg.
Right. But the practice itself, that has to be
much older. Oh, absolutely. Historians point
all the way back to the Middle Ages. The ancient
Mongols, for instance, practiced a highly effective
form of total war. They were terrifyingly efficient.
They didn't just send an army. they organize
their entire society. as a mobile military machine.
Every available resource. Military personnel,
noncombatant workers, intelligence networks,
transport provisions. Everything was engineered
toward the absolute destruction and subjugation
of the enemy. If you resisted the Mongols, they
didn't just defeat your army, they erased your
city. Fast forward a few centuries to the 18th
century, and the French Revolution really kicks
this concept into high gear on the European continent.
Right, in 1793. Yeah, facing a massive coalition
of enemies, the new French Republic instituted
something called the Lévé en masse. Mass conscription.
And the scale of this was unprecedented for the
time. This decree created a fighting force of
roughly 1 .5 million people. That's a massive
army for the 1700s. Unheard of. But it wasn't
just about putting muskets in the hands of young
men. The decree literally outlined how the entire
society would function. Right. Married men were
ordered to forge arms and transport provisions.
Women were ordered to make tents and serve in
hospitals. Wait, I remember reading about this.
Didn't they even mobilize children and the elderly?
Yes, they did. The decree specifically stated
that children would turn old lint into linen
for bandages. Wow. And even old men were ordered
to go to the public squares to preach hatred
of kings and boost morale. That is the very definition
of total mobilization. Every demographic had
a job. It's the entire society operating as a
single weapon. And as we move into the 19th century,
this starts happening more frequently. You see
it during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812.
The Russians use a devastating scorched earth
retreat. Right. They burn their own infrastructure,
their own agriculture, and eventually even Moscow
itself purely to starve the French army. You
also had the grueling Peninsula War in Spain
and Portugal, which tied down hundreds of thousands
of French troops against a massive, unrelenting
civilian insurgency. And it wasn't just a European
phenomenon either. Not at all. Look at South
America. The Paraguayan War, which ran from 1864
to 1870, is widely cited by historians as the
first true total war in the Americas. Paraguay's
leader mobilized almost the entire male population
to fight an alliance of Argentina, Brazil, Exactly.
The entire society and economy were structured
around a vision of either absolute victory or
utter defeat. And the result was catastrophic.
Completely. Paraguay suffered a staggering loss
of life. Some estimates suggest they lost over
half their total population and the vast majority
of their adult men. It was an all consuming conflict.
Which naturally brings us to the U .S. Civil
War and specifically General William Tecumseh
Sherman's infamous march to the sea across Georgia
in 1864. Yeah, Sherman actually wrote a letter
to his chief of staff defending the destruction.
He said that the union was not only fighting
hostile armies, but also people. Right. He famously
wrote that he must make old and young. rich and
poor feel the hard hand of war. It was a brutal
psychological and logistical campaign. But wait,
let me push back on this for a second. I've read
that Sherman actually ordered his men to largely
spare civilian homes. That's true, yeah. So if
he's actively trying to avoid killing civilians
in their houses, does that really qualify as
a true total war under the academic definition?
That is a great question, and it's actually a
point of major historical debate. Many purists
argue it wasn't a true total war precisely because
he didn't systematically slaughter civilians.
Okay, so why include it? Well, the reason it
often gets included in this category is because
of its focus on infrastructure. Sherman's troops
destroyed railroads, burned crops, and dynamated
the South's economic capacity to sustain the
war effort. So it laid the psychological and
tactical groundwork for what was coming. Exactly.
It proved that targeting the enemy's ability
to produce and transport goods was just as effective
as shooting at their soldiers. Here's where it
gets really interesting. World War I. This is
where the sheer force of the Industrial Revolution
meets the battlefield, and it creates the ultimate
prototype for modern total war. A major turning
point here was the advent of air warfare. Suddenly,
the front lines didn't matter in the same way.
You didn't have to march an army through the
mud to hurt your enemy anymore. You could just
fly over them. There was a commander of German
Imperial Navy zeppelins named Peter Strasser.
Right. He orchestrated strategic bombing campaigns
across Europe and the UK, intentionally dropping
bombs from these massive airships onto cities
and civilians. And his justification for this
was a chilling reflection of the new era. He
essentially argued that in modern warfare there
is no such thing as a non -combatant. Because
if a civilian is making the bullets, Strasser's
logic is that the civilian is just a different
kind of soldier. Precisely. Right. If they are
part of the war machine, they are a target. And
to make sure those civilians back home kept making
those bullets and kept their morale up, governments
realized they had to seize control of the public
mind. The birth of the modern propaganda machine.
Exactly. On the home front, particularly in the
UK, the government took total control of the
narrative. They plastered cities with government
posters. They controlled what people ate through
rationing, and they dictated what jobs people
could take. They even infiltrated entertainment,
using music halls to push propaganda songs aimed
at recruitment. Society had to be kept in a state
of constant fervent support for the war. And
the economy had to completely pivot. I was reading
about the shell crisis of 1915 in Britain. Am
I understanding this correctly? Did the British
military literally just run out of artillery
shells in the middle of a global war? They absolutely
did. And it caused a massive political scandal.
It forced the creation of an entirely new government
department, the Ministry of Munitions under David
Lloyd George. Wow. That moment proved that you
couldn't just rely on the free market and private
companies doing their own thing during a total
war. The government had to step in and forcefully
gear the entire economy toward producing weapons.
And of course, if all your factories are making
shells and all your farmers are in the trenches,
you run out of food. Severe rationing became
the norm. British and German food production
plummeted. The British Royal Navy blockaded German
ports, intentionally trying to starve the civilian
population to hasten their surrender. And the
sheer scale of manpower mobilization was staggering.
Consider Bulgaria during World War I. They mobilized
25 % of their entire population. Just wrap your
mind around that. One in four people in the entire
country actively mobilized for war. And to achieve
that scale of mobilization, you need a very specific
and usually very oppressive kind of government.
There's a political theorist named Carl Schmitt
who wrote about this concept of total politics.
Schmitt argued that an authoritarian total state,
one that exerts direct unquestioned control over
the press, the economy and social life, is an
absolute prerequisite to fighting a total war.
Because you simply cannot mobilize a society
to that extreme degree if the state doesn't have
total authority to force people to comply. Which
perfectly sets the stage for World War II. If
World War I was the industrial prototype, World
War II represents the absolute peak of the concept.
It is the quintessential total war of modernity.
The unprecedented scale, the multi -continental
battle space, the active targeting of civilians,
it is almost unfathomable. Let's look at how
this played out in the United Kingdom. They had
learned the harsh lessons of World War I. They
immediately instituted rationing and legal blackouts,
forcing everyone to cover their windows so German
bombers couldn't see city lights at night. But
it was a manpower shift that was so dramatic.
Not only were men conscripted immediately, but
women were heavily conscripted as land girls
to run the agricultural sector. Right, and young
men known as Bevan boys were conscripted to work
down in the coal mines to keep the power grid
running. Winston Churchill actually summed it
up perfectly. He said, the front line runs through
the factories. The workmen are soldiers with
different weapons, but the same courage. And
we is a profound consequence of that mobilization,
tying right back to Tiziano Petsch's fifth dimension
of total change that we talked about earlier.
The earthquake. Yes. Because of the threat of
German bombing raids on industrial centers, the
British government enacted a massive evacuation
of children. Right, millions of kids put on trains
with little name tags sent away from their parents.
Think about the social impact of that. You had
children from deep urban squalor and extreme
poverty in places like London suddenly billeted
in middle and upper -class rural households in
the countryside. For the first time in modern
history, these incredibly rigid British social
classes were forced to mix in their own homes.
The affluent classes saw the reality of urban
poverty firsthand through these children, and
the urban kids experienced life outside the slums.
Historians note that this permanently altered
British society. It laid the emotional and political
groundwork for the post -war welfare state. Wow.
Let's just sit with that for a second. So a desperate
military defense tactic, just trying to keep
kids safe from bombs, accidentally shattered
the British class system, and essentially helped
build the modern social safety net. That entirely
proves that fifth dimension of total change.
The war ends, but the society is forever altered.
Now, contrast that British mobilization with
Nazi Germany. Because looking at the history,
there's a genuinely surprising fact. Germany
was actually quite late to embrace a total war
economy. Which seems entirely counterintuitive,
right? Given their aggression, you'd think they'd
be fully mobilized from day one. Completely.
But the military and Nazi leadership deeply believed
in the World War I stab in the back myth. They
convinced themselves they lost the first war
because the home front collapsed and civilians
gave up. Not because the military failed. So
to keep morale high, they tried to keep the German
civilian population comfortable for as long as
possible. They relied on the Blitzkrieg short
lightning fast military campaigns so they wouldn't
have to fully mobilize the economy and adore
rationing. They delayed that mobilization for
years. He really did. It wasn't until the absolute
failure of Operation Barbarossa and their massive
defeat at the Battle of Moscow that they realized
they were trapped in a long grueling war of attrition.
It took until February 1943 for propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels to stand up at the Berlin Sport
Palace and famously scream to the crowd, asking
them if they wanted total war. Meanwhile, on
the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union was already
operating as a relentless total war machine.
And this was largely because the USSR was a command
economy. Let's clarify that for a second. How
does a command economy differ from what we're
used to? Unlike a free market where private businesses
decide what to make based on consumer demand,
a command economy means the government dictates
exactly what is produced, how much is produced,
and by whom. So the Soviets already had the legal
and economic system in place to instantly redirect
everything toward the war effort. As the Germans
advanced, The Soviets executed an astonishing
logistical feat. They literally physically dismantled
their factories, packed the heavy machinery onto
trains, and moved entire labor forces hundreds
of miles east of the Ural Mountains out of bomber
range just to keep producing weapons. So how
did the Soviets counter the German advance on
the ground? I imagine their production had to
go into absolute overdrive. Overdrive doesn't
even begin to cover it. At the Battle of Stalingrad,
the Soviet commitment to production was so intense
that newly built T -34 tanks were being driven
straight off the factory floor, directly into
combat. You're kidding. Straight into the battle?
Literally out the factory doors and into the
line of fire. They didn't even have time to paint
them. Unpainted tanks rolling into a war zone.
Unbelievable. But the human cost of that Soviet
machine was beyond comprehension. The historical
record estimates that 27 million Soviet citizens
died during the war. 27 million. It's a number
so huge it almost loses its meaning. It's just
devastating. And then on the other side of the
world you had the United States waking up as
an unprecedented industrial juggernaut. After
Pearl Harbor, the U .S. mobilized on a scale
the world had never seen. Academics became government
technocrats. Millions of homemakers went into
factories to build bombers and tanks. The productivity
was absurd. They were routinely building multi
-thousand ton convoy ships, Liberty ships, in
a matter of weeks, sometimes in a month and a
half. And nothing was wasted. Civilians and children
were doing scrap metal drives. Homemakers were
saving cooking fat and grease to be repurposed
for explosives. The massive scientific communities
were mobilized, culminating, of course, in the
Manhattan Project and the birth of the atomic
age. You contrast that American industrial drive
with Imperial Japan, who passed a state general
mobilization law that gave their government unlimited
control over civilian organizations and unions.
And to fuel their war machine. Japan utilized
forced labor on a horrifying scale. They pressed
over 18 million people in East Asia into forced
labor, alongside millions of brutalized slave
laborers. And because of the sheer, all -encompassing
scale of this global total war, it couldn't end
with a traditional sit -down treaty. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt declared at the Casablanca
conference that the allies would only accept
unconditional surrender. Right. No negotiations,
no compromise. Exactly. And this created a highly
unique legal situation. Because the Axis regimes
didn't just surrender, they completely collapsed.
A legal condition known in international law
as debilatio. Debilatio. OK. What does that actually
mean in practice? Think of it like a state completely
evaporating into thin air. There is no surviving
legitimate government left to negotiate a peace
treaty with. Because the state itself ceased
to exist, the Allies essentially became the governing
law. And that unprecedented total defeat laid
the specific legal groundwork necessary for the
Allies to prosecute individuals for war crimes,
which led to the post -war Nuremberg trials.
Total war leading to total defeat. which ushers
us right into the nuclear age and modern conflicts
because the invention of atomic weapons fundamentally
changed the calculus of war forever. U .S. Air
Force General Curtis LeMay took the concept of
total war and updated it for the nuclear age.
His proposal was essentially deliver the entire
nuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow.
His exact words were to go as far as killing
a nation. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
it explains exactly why we haven't seen a massive
industrial total war between major world powers
since 1945. Nuclear weapons made it logistically
impractical and strategically suicidal. By the
1950s, we entered the era of mutually assured
destruction or M .I .D. Because if you launch
your missiles, they launch their missiles and
everybody loses. Exactly. As Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev is widely quoted as saying, in the
event of a nuclear war, the living will envy
the dead. So the superpowers had to pivot. Instead
of fighting each other directly in a catastrophic
total war, they fought proxy wars in places like
Vietnam and Afghanistan. Now it's important to
look at how academics classify modern conflicts
today. Researchers point to several post -WWII
regional conflicts, like the 1948 Arab -Israeli
War, the Iran -Iraq War in the 1980s, the Russo
-Ukrainian War, and the Gaza War, and classify
them under this total war umbrella. Yeah. And
to be clear, as we look at this, we aren't here
to weigh in on the heavy politics or take sides
on these deeply complex and tragic conflicts.
We're purely looking at this through the academic
lens of our sources, how the immense scale of
mobilization, the targeting of infrastructure,
and the blurring of civilian and military lines
fit the historical definitions of total war we've
been talking about. It shows that while a global
World War Two style conflict involving all the
major powers hasn't happened since 1945, the
grim methodologies of total war, the full mobilization
of populations and economies still very much
persist in regional conflicts today. So what
does this all mean? When you look back at all
these sources, total war reveals itself as the
ultimate paradox of human history. It really
does. On one hand, it represents the darkest,
most destructive capacities of humanity. It is
the complete erasure of the line between soldier
and civilian. But on the other hand, it has acted
as this bizarre, undeniable catalyst for massive
leaps forward. Unprecedented advances in medicine,
engineering, physics, and even social equality
were forged in the sheer desperation of total
war. It's important to recognize how much of
your daily life is shaped by this history. For
the nuclear energy that might power your home,
to the structure of modern social welfare systems
we discussed, to the very technology and jet
engines we use to travel. So much of it is the
direct fallout of societies that were forced
to totally mobilize, centralize, and innovate
for their sheer survival. It's a heavy, heavy
legacy to inherit. It is. And this raises an
important question, something for you to think
about as you go about your day. If the core of
total war is ultimately about the complete centralization,
mobilization, and control of a society's information,
its industry, and its people, could a modern
society ever find itself pushed into a state
of total war by a massive technological, economic,
or environmental crisis without a single shot
ever being fired? That is a fascinating and terrifying
thought. A total mobilization for survival against
a changing climate or a collapsed global grid.
We will leave you with that to mull over. Thank
you for joining us on this deep dive. Keep cutting
through the noise, keep questioning assumptions,
and most importantly, keep learning. We'll get
you next time.