An era of “total war” has returned

 

  An era of “total war” has returned, argues former Pentagon policy official Mara Karlin, writing this week in Foreign Affairs. “An era of limited war has ended; an age of comprehensive conflict has begun,” she says.

How so? “In both Ukraine and the Middle East, what has become clear is that the relatively narrow scope that defined war during the post-9/11 era has dramatically widened,” writes Karlin, who served for more than two years as the Biden administration’s assistant defense secretary for strategy, plans, and capabilities. “Indeed, what the world is witnessing today is akin to what theorists in the past have called ‘total war,’ in which combatants draw on vast resources, mobilize their societies, prioritize warfare over all other state activities, attack a broad variety of targets, and reshape their economies and those of other countries.”

 The twist: New technologies and a globalized economy make the new total wars different from earlier eras, so strategists and planners must rethink how they fight and prepare, Karlin argues.