Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!xylogics!bu.edu!att!cbnews!military
From: plains!umn-cs!LOCAL!thornley@uunet.UU.NET (David H. Thornley)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Civil War technology
Keywords: Ironclads, Civil War
Message-ID: <1990Oct24.152105.16843@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 24 Oct 90 15:21:05 GMT
References: <1990Oct11.050851.29295@cbnews.att.com> <1990Oct18.021506.7493@cbnews.att.com> <1990Oct19..15182@cbnews.att.com>
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From: plains!umn-cs!LOCAL!thornley@uunet.UU.NET (David H. Thornley)
[mod.note: Followups to soc.history.  - Bill ]

In article <1990Oct19..15182@cbnews.att.com> raymond%europa@uunet.UU.NET (Raymond Man) writes:
>
>
>From: raymond%europa@uunet.UU.NET (Raymond Man)
>
>I seem to recall that in J.F.C. Fuller's book (I forgot the title), total
>war means involving the whole population of the country. Before the
>Napolion wars, most fighting are done by professional soldiers and
>mercinaries.
>
No war has ever included the entire population of a country, except as
victims.  It is real hard to find a military function for a baby.  If we
restrict the idea of "whole population," we find that quite a few ancient
societies had the idea that all of the free healthy adult males owed
military service.  Often, the situation was such that most of them could
indeed participate in a battle or war, whereas more modern wars typically
require more of a logistic base, due to fighting over larger areas, so
in this sense modern wars are less total than the ancient ones.  (We also
have prejudices against slaughtering entire cities, or selling them into
slavery.)

As an aside, many people seem to be considering Western European warfare
from the end of the Thirty Years' War to the French Revolution as a
general model of warfare before Napoleon.  It doesn't work.  The French
Revolution and following wars were certainly the most total since the
Thirty Years' War, and contributed many techonological innovations,
but conscription (in various forms) and any reasonable definition of
"total war" were practiced thousands of years before.

DHT