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Though incompatible, the global economy and total war are both children of this century. The strategic goal in traditional warfare, in Clausewitz’s famous phrase, was “to destroy the enemy’s fighting forces.” War was to be waged against the enemy’s soldiers. It was not supposed to be waged against enemy civilians and their property. There were always exceptions, of course, Sherman’s March through Georgia at the end of the US Civil war was aimed at civilians and their property rather than the threadbare confederate army. But that is was an exception and meant to be one – is one reason it is still so vividly remembered. A few years later, in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, Bismarck took great  care to keep France’s  financial system intact.

But during the century’s first war, the Boer war, the rule was changed. The goal of warfare was redefined as destroying the enemy’s potential for waging war, which meant destroying the enemy’s economy. Also, for the first time in modern Western history, war was systematically waged against the enemy’s civilian population. To break the fighting spirit of the Boer soldiers, the British herded Boer women and children into history’s  first concentration camps.

Excerpted from Page 138 of ‘Managing in the Next Society’ by Peter Drucker