page_title: Schlieffen Plan
section_title: Ermattungsstrategie
hierarchical_section_title: Schlieffen Plan / Background / Ermattungsstrategie
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Fotografie von Hans Delbrück. English: photography of Hans Delbrück.
context_page_description: The Schlieffen Plan was a name given after the First World War to German war plans, the influence of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and his thinking on an invasion of France and Belgium which began on 4 August 1914. Schlieffen was Chief of the General Staff of the German Army from 1891 to 1906. In 1905 and 1906, Schlieffen devised an army deployment plan for a war-winning offensive against the French Third Republic. After losing the First World War, German official historians of the Reichsarchiv and other writers described the plan as a blueprint for victory. Generaloberst Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, succeeded Schlieffen as Chief of the German General Staff in 1906 and was dismissed after the First Battle of the Marne. German historians claimed that Moltke had ruined the plan by meddling with it out of timidity.
context_section_description: The Strategiestreit (strategy debate) was a public and sometimes acrimonious argument after Hans Delbrück (11 November 1848 – 14 July 1929), challenged the orthodox army view and its critics. Delbrück was editor of the Preußische Jahrbücher (Prussian Annals), author of Die Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte (The History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History; four volumes 1900–1920) and professor of modern history at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1895. General Staff historians and commentators like Friedrich von Bernhardi, Rudolph von Caemmerer, Max Jähns and Reinhold Koser, believed that Delbrück was challenging the strategic wisdom of the army. Delbrück had introduced Quellenkritik/Sachkritik (source criticism) developed by Leopold von Ranke, into the study of military history and attempted a reinterpretation of Vom Kriege (On War). Delbrück wrote that Clausewitz had intended to divide strategy into Vernichtungsstrategie (strategy of destruction) or Ermattungsstrategie (strategy of exhaustion) but had died in 1830 before he could revise the book.
  Delbrück wrote that Frederick the Great had used Ermattungsstrategie during the Seven Years' War (1754/56–1763) because eighteenth century armies were small and made up of professionals and pressed men. The professionals were hard to replace and the conscripts would run away if the army tried to live off the land, operate in close country or pursue a defeated enemy, in the manner of the later armies of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Dynastic armies were tied to magazines for supply, which made them incapable of fulfilling a strategy of annihilation. Delbrück analysed the European alliance system that had developed since the 1890s, the Boer War (11 October 1899 – 31 May 1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) and concluded that the rival forces were too well-balanced for a quick war. The growth in the size of armies made a swift victory unlikely and British intervention would add a naval blockade to the rigours of an indecisive land war. Germany would face a war of attrition, similar to the view Delbrück had formed of the Seven Years' War. By the 1890s, the Strategiestreit had entered public discourse, when soldiers like the two Moltkes, also doubted the possibility of a quick victory in a European war. The German army was forced to examine its assumptions about war because of this dissenting view and some writers moved closer to Delbrück's position. The debate provided the German army with a fairly familiar alternative to Vernichtungsstrategie, after the opening campaigns of 1914.
caption: Hans Delbrück
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