Total war

Total war is a type of warfare that mobilizes the totality of national resources to sustain the war effort (particularly through war production), blurring the line between military and civilian activities and legitimating attacks on civilian targets as part of a war without restrictions as to the combatants, territory or objectives involved.

The term has been defined as "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."

In the mid-19th century, scholars identified what later became known as total war as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants 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.