Profiles in Vice - Alfred von Schlieffen, the German General Staff, and "Just Because You Can..."

Just as with loyalty, which was my first focus, it was difficult at first to find an example of diligence transformed from virtue to vice.  As it happens, my current audiobook is Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, about the first month of the First World War.  That's where today's post came from.

Prussia in the age of Frederick the Great was called "an army with a state."  Of course, Napoleon handily demonstrated that that army, untethered from the genius of Frederick, was about the same as any other Napoleonic-era military force (a lesson that France should've taken note of - elan is insufficient by itself!).  As a reaction to this, a series of reformers in the late-Napoleonic period, most notably including Clausewitz and Scharnhorst, professionalized the officer class in much the same way that the Royal Navy professionalized over the 18th Century.  Their reforms included an emphasis on staff work and planning, and the creation of a war-plans division.  Staff planning became the hallmark of Prussia on campaign, in a century that transformed Prussia from relative liberalism (for an absolute monarchy) to near-perfect reactionary militarism, and from Prussia into Germany.  Staff work, especially Moltke's mobilization work, won the Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War.

Of course, Germany's success rested on two factors - the professionalization of the army, and the political maneuvers of Otto von Bismarck.  The army with a state now had a great industrial power as its state, and it required a strong hand to control it; after Bismarck, there was no such hand in Germany.  Germany, therefore, drifted from Clausewitz's dictum that war is policy continued by extraordinary means, and began to view international policy as an opportunity for military force.  This was hardly unique to Germany during this period - United States diplomacy at this point was, after all, wedded to the Great White Fleet, the Maine, and Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" doctrine, and compared to the European powers the United States had virtually no military or inclination to use it.

Indeed, the Schlieffen Plan was not even unique in its violation of Belgian neutrality - that was a fundamental assumption of French, British, and German war planning, it was merely a game of paper-rock-scissors to see who would cross the border first.  The general assumption, helped by the Kaiser saying things like "my army will go through Belgium like that," was that Germany would be first across the frontier.

This brings me to the Schlieffen Plan itself.  The Franco-German border was one massive fortress, with no good way to make the same lunge that Germany had made in 1870, or for that matter for the French to retake Alsace-Lorraine.  Instead, the finest strategic mind in the German General Staff, General Alfred von Schlieffen, came up with the idea of weakening the German line in Alsace-Lorraine long enough to plunge the German army through Belgium and into the French rear.  A great deal of ink has been spilled about whether or not Schlieffen's plan was a true plan, a thought experiment, or something in between; what we know of Schlieffen himself suggests that it was plan enough to be shared with the staff, and, in the final analysis, that was enough to send the army through Belgium in 1914.

Old Sourpuss himself.  I feel like there's a pattern here...

Alfred von Schlieffen was a Prussian, product of an old family, and a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War who attracted attention for his role in that war.  Afterward, he became a professional staff officer, beginning in the military-history section - his book Cannae was a standard military text of the prewar years - and spent the remainder of his career, until 1906, as the foremost of Germany's military thinkers.  He was known for being an icy, friendless, austere man, who, when one of his subordinates pointed out how beautiful a river looked in the sunrise after an all-night staff ride, supposedly replied with "An insignificant obstacle."  He was, in short, diligent to the point of vice, and while he was the foremost member of his military class, he was not unique.

This became a repeated theme: after Bismarck, the Kaiser was more interested in military action, and therefore the military became a dominant voice in German politics.  Outside of the Plan, Schlieffen had proposed various other, often expensive, military reforms; between 1905 and 1914, after he retired, on the strength of his reputation, many of those reforms were pushed through thanks to the peculiar structure of the German government of the time, wherein the Kaiser had the ability to adjust the budget on demand, based on who had most recently whispered in his ear.

The result was that the German army came to dominate German politics, internally and externally.  There was a rearguard action, certainly - Germany was, after all, the birthplace of socialism and internationalism, the twin enemies of the conservative class - but German militarism made a long-term peace unlikely, and a war only a matter of time.

Thus, when the Balkans inevitably exploded, and German diplomacy was phrased in military brusqueness, war became completely inevitable.  Even at this hour the Kaiser wavered on war in the west.  He asked whether it would be possible to hold off on decisive action, the commander of the German army, Helmuth von Moltke the younger, emphatically insisted that the hour of decision had already passed, because the trains were already rolling and there was no way to re-route them.  As it turned out, the German army did indeed have plans on hand to shift troops rapidly from western to eastern front, and would indeed put them to use later in the war.

The point of all of this is that the Germans had diligently trained with single-minded focus on one course of action, and executed it with as close to textbook precision as was possible in the real world.  Unfortunately, they did not evaluate effectively whether that course of action - war through Belgium - was the best, most effective, or wisest one.  Even those like Moltke, who predicted long war because modern industry and mobilization made the German ideal of the rapid war impossible, never seriously wavered from the basic plan of violating Belgian neutrality.

This is made even worse by the fact that Schlieffen himself seemed to have conceived the basic operation as a counter-attack.  He believed that the French could be baited in Alsace-Lorraine, given just enough bait to hook them, and then, once they were fully hooked, they could be surprised by the turn through Belgium.  This, too, failed to consider whether violating Belgian neutrality was the wisest move, because the army was dragging Germany along.

At the end of the day, this devotion to a single concept of operations, and the failure to consider alternatives in depth, or whether that course of action should even be pursued, managed to turn diligence from virtue - the German army's planning and training was absolutely vital to modern warfare - into vice - the German army had no idea what to do when that one overwhelming plan bogged down in the short term, and blew up in their faces in the long term.  Schlieffen's legacy was that the German army had so effectively answered "can I do this?" that it failed to consider "should I do this?" and "is this the best possible thing I can do?" Thus, an excess of diligence, with no tempering discernment or exercise of franchise, became vice.