Gradually, the development of industrial production had become adequate to support mass warfare. Obviously, an industrial economy could now more easily become a war economy, making it possible for a preponderant number of able-bodied men, trained in the use of weapons, to be diverted from their activities to devote themselves to external imperialist conquest or to defend against it. The new techniques of stockpiling and the new means of transportation were also instrumental in making total war possible. In this new type of war men, who had to be shifted between battlefields by tens and hundreds of thousands, became a new kind of matériel that had to be conditioned, supplied, retrieved, reconditioned, and redistributed. After more than a century of existence this landscape of total war has become quite familiar to us.