Війни в минулі століття вели держави, релігійні організації.
В наш час воюють корпорації, держави, приватні армії, релігійні та терористичні організації, кримінальні угруповання, одинаки.
Тотальна війна розпочалась кілька десятиліть тому... а може тисячоліть?

Кому вигідна тотальна війна?

Why do wars occur and recur, especially in cases when the decisions involved are made by careful and rational actors? There are many answers to this question. Given the importance of the question, and the wide range of answers, it is essential to have a perspective on the various sources of conflict. In this chapter we provide a critical overview of the theory of war. In particular, we provide not just a taxonomy of causes of conflict, but also some insight into the necessity of and interrelation between different
factors that lead to war.
...
A good portion of our overview of the cause
s of war is thus spent discussing a framework of different bargaining failures.
We emphasize that understanding sources of
bargaining failure is not only useful as a categorization, but also be cause different types of failures lead to different conclusions
about the types of wars that emerge, and particularly about things likethe duration of war.

We return to comment on this after discussing various reasons for bargaining failure. Below, we talk in detail about the
following five reasons for bargaining failure:

1. Asymmetric information about the pot
ential costs and benefits of war.
2. A lack of ability to enforce a bargaining agreement and/or a lack of the ability
to credibly commit to abide by an agreement.
3. Indivisibilities of resources
that might change hands in
a war, so that not all
potentially mutually beneficial ba
rgaining agreements are feasible.
4. Agency problems, where the incentives of leaders differ from those of the
populations that they represent.
5. Multilateral interactions where every
potential agreement is blocked by some
coalition of states or cons
tituencies who can derail it.

To illustrate the importance of understanding which reason lies behind a conflict,
note that if there is a lack of ability to enforce or commit to an agreement, then a war may
last a long time. It will last until either one side has emerged victorious, or the situation
has changed so that the costs of continued conflict have become overwhelmingly high for
all sides. Such a lack of enforceable agreements is often one of the main ingredients
leading to protracted wars. In contrast, suppose that enforceable and credible agreements
are possible, but that the states start with asymmetric information, for instance, about the
relative strength of one of the two countries. In such a case, there can be a bargaining
failure which leads to war. However, in such a setting once war really begins the relative
strengths of the countries can become clearer, and given that credible bargaining is
possible and can avoid further costs of war the states could then reach an agreement to
end the war. So, different durations of wars can correspond to different sources of
bargaining failures. We expand on this below.