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.