latter usually meant the enemy army, although that too could be defined in policy
contexts, as had been the case against Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866. He
also developed the concept of operations as war’s offensive element. Railroads
had increased the strength of the strategic defensive. Firepower dominated tactics.
In both cases, logic, reinforced by friction, tended towards stagnation. The
operational sphere was the province of will, planning, and insight. Prussia and
Germany’s enduring need for quick, decisive victory correspondingly rendered
imperative the cultivation of operational art. 35
Metaphorically speaking, Alfred von Schlieffen was not a whist player. If this
narrowly focused man had a defining game, it was chess. In contrast to Moltke,
Schlieffen sought to integrate strategy, operations, and tactics in a seamless web.
His goal was a ‘total battle’,Gesamtschlacht, that would begin with mobilization,
move through concentration, deployment, and advance to contact, then culmi-
nate in a battle of envelopment built around flanking manoeuvres and flank
attacks. Not for him the random fall of the cards, the acceptance of strategy as a
system of expedients. Schlieffen believed that strategy drove operations and
operations drove strategy. He believed, moreover, that the entire process must
proceed as quickly as possible. The sheer size of modern armies exponentially
exacerbated the problem of control, and correspondingly nurtured entropy.
Citizen armies built around mobilized civilians would inevitably be unprepared
for combat. Victory was disproportionally likely to go to the side best able to
exploit an opponent’s unreadiness by throwing him off balance and keeping him
confused. 36
This need for haste had two taproots. One was the diplomatic fecklessness of
the post-Bismarckian Reich: Germany’s diplomats and leaders were alike, inex-
perienced in the nuances of world power politics. Theirs was the heritage of
Prussia, a regional power with limited interests beyond Germany and Poland.
Germany had neither treaty rights nor historical precedents to support too many
of her claims. Nor did she have statesmen able to play second-best hands into
winners at an international poker table against reasonably competent rivals
holding better cards. 37
The results were an increasingly shaky Austrian alliance, an increasingly alie-
nated Great Britain, and, above all, a Republican France and an Imperial Russia
brought together by mutual fear of what Michael Stu ̈rmer appropriately calls ‘the
restless Reich’. That alliance was the bedrock of European diplomacy for twenty
years, and its increasing stability made the prospects of a two-front war more and
more a reality.
The spectre of one kind of war, that theory and experience alike agreed Germany
could not win, shaped and drove Schlieffen’s concept of a total battle won from as
close to a standing start as possible against France, the enemy that could not trade
space for time. 38 But most immediately that concept in turn ran into a technologi-
cal imperative generating the second kind of war Germany could not win: a
deadlock. The heavy losses incurred by Prussian attackers in 1870 encouraged in
the next decade comprehensive revision of infantry tactics to incorporate and
emphasize the advantages associated with defence: planning, cover, and firepower.
44 The Evolution of Operational Art