Review: The deadly effects of assumptions in War Plans
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 23, 2013
This short work explores a well known hypothesis: that once mobilization had begun events developed their own momentum.  Overall I would give it three and half stars.  This may be less than other reviewers but despite being a classic work I feel I should rate on the basis of its relevence to the 21st century reader.  There are some minor editing errors through-out.The author examines this hypothesis from the view of all the parties: Austro-Hungary, Russian, French and German.  What is proposed was that the inital limited mobilizations by the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires were designed as political and cautionary moves, not to trigger actual war nor to be an irreversible exercise.The carefully plotted plans dealing with: hundreds of trains, thousands (then millions of men), hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies limited the flexibility of movements.  However, the only case where war had to result was the case of German mobilization because the plans dictated attacks based on the forward movement from the mobiilization centers.The author makes the case that the German attack plan used, the Schlieffen plan, had been conceived as an exercise and never took account of any reaction by the French, Belgium, or British.  None of these mobilization plans had ever been conducted as full-scale, or under war conditions and hence all had a degree of unreality to them.  The war-game results of the Schlieffen plan had never played out because of the lack of fresh reserves, nor could the problem of fresh reserves be resolved in the pre-mechanized age.The political blundering that occured, due to lack of understanding by the various governments and even their own military advisors, is also touched upon and was a major factor that turned minor confrontation into major conflagation.Never explained, or possibly unexplainable, is the pig-headed view of the German command that violation of Belgium was excusible or that the military campaign in France could be conducted before British or Russian intervention would have effect.  The lack of appreciation that Wilheim's Naval Policy had made Great Britain very edgy and opposed to any expansive move by Germany was widespread in the German military.  The surprise that Great Britain moved against Germany and would come to support the French was widespread in the German military.WWI was a war that avoidable, but at the same time inevitable, and lead to the loss not only of late 19th century optimism but the run-up to the ever increasing horror and genocide of the 20th century.