Editing Schlieffen Plan (section)

===Schlieffen===
In February 1891, Schlieffen was appointed to the post of Chief of the {{lang|de|[[Großer Generalstab]]}} (Great General Staff), the professional head of the {{lang|de|[[German Army (German Empire)|Kaiserheer]]}} ({{lang|de|Deutsches Heer}} [German Army]). The post had lost influence to rival institutions in the German state because of the machinations of [[Alfred von Waldersee]] (1832–1904), who had held the post from 1888 to 1891 and had tried to use his position as a political stepping stone.{{sfn|Foley|2007|p=63}}{{efn|On taking up the post, Schlieffen had been made to reprimand publicly Waldersee's subordinates.{{sfn|Foley|2007|p=63}}}} Schlieffen was seen as a safe choice, being junior, anonymous outside the General Staff and with few interests outside the army. Other governing institutions gained power at the expense of the General Staff and Schlieffen had no following in the army or state. The fragmented and antagonistic character of German state institutions made the development of a grand strategy most difficult, because no institutional body co-ordinated foreign, domestic and war policies. The General Staff planned in a political vacuum and Schlieffen's weak position was exacerbated by his narrow military view.{{sfn|Foley|2007|pp=63–64}}

In the army, organisation and theory had no obvious link with war planning and institutional responsibilities overlapped. The General Staff devised deployment plans and its chief became {{lang|la|[[de facto]]}} Commander-in-Chief in war but in peace, command was vested in the commanders of the twenty army corps districts. The corps district commanders were independent of the General Staff Chief and trained soldiers according to their own devices. The federal system of government in the German empire included ministries of war in the constituent states, which controlled the forming and equipping of units, command and promotions. The system was inherently competitive and became more so after the Waldersee period, with the likelihood of another {{lang|de|Volkskrieg}}, a war of the nation in arms, rather than the few European wars fought by small professional armies after 1815.{{sfn|Foley|2007|p=15}} Schlieffen concentrated on matters he could influence and pressed for increases in the size of the army and the adoption of new weapons. A big army would create more choices about how to fight a war and better weapons would make the army more formidable. Mobile heavy artillery could offset numerical inferiority against a Franco–Russian coalition and smash quickly, numerous fortified places. Schlieffen tried to make the army more operationally capable, to be superior to its potential enemies and achieve a decisive victory.{{sfn|Foley|2007|pp=64–65}}

Schlieffen continued the practice of staff rides ({{lang|de|[[staff ride|Stabs-Reise]]}}) tours of territory where military operations might take place and [[Military simulation|war games]], to teach techniques to command a mass conscript army. The new national armies were so huge that battles would be spread over a much greater space than in the past and Schlieffen expected that army corps would fight {{lang|de|Teilschlachten}} (battle segments) equivalent to the tactical engagements of smaller dynastic armies. {{lang|de|Teilschlachten}} could occur anywhere, as corps and armies closed with the opposing army and became a {{lang|de|Gesamtschlacht}} (complete battle), in which the significance of the battle segments would be determined by the plan of the commander in chief, who would give operational orders to the corps,

{{quote|The success of battle today depends more on conceptual coherence than on territorial proximity. Thus, one battle might be fought in order to secure victory on another battlefield.|Schlieffen, 1909{{sfn|Foley|2007|p=66}}}}

in the former manner to battalions and regiments. ''War against France'' (1905), the memorandum later known as the "Schlieffen Plan", was a strategy for a war of extraordinarily big battles, in which corps commanders would be independent in ''how'' they fought, provided that it was according to the ''intent'' of the commander in chief. The commander led the complete battle, like commanders in the Napoleonic Wars. The war plans of the commander in chief were intended to organise haphazard [[Meeting engagement|encounter battles]] to make "the sum of these battles was more than the sum of the parts".{{sfn|Foley|2007|p=66}}

====Deployment plans, 1892–1893 to 1905–1906====
In his war contingency plans from {{nowrap|1892 to 1906,}} Schlieffen faced the difficulty that the French could not be forced to fight a decisive battle quickly enough for German forces to be transferred to the east against the [[Imperial Russian Army]] to fight a [[Two-front war|war on two fronts]], one-front-at-a-time. Driving out the French from their frontier fortifications would be a slow and costly process that Schlieffen preferred to avoid by a flanking movement through the [[Low Countries]]. In 1893, this was judged impractical because of a lack of manpower and mobile [[heavy artillery]]. In 1899, Schlieffen added the manoeuvre to German war plans, as a possibility, if the French pursued a defensive strategy. The German army was more powerful and by 1905, after the [[Battle of Mukden|Russian defeat in Manchuria]], Schlieffen judged the army to be formidable enough to make the northern flanking manoeuvre the basis of a war plan against France alone.{{sfnm|1a1=Foley|1y=2007|1pp=66–67|2a1=Holmes|2y=2014a|2p=62}}

In 1905, Schlieffen wrote that the Russo-Japanese War {{nowrap|(8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905),}} had shown that the power of Russian army had been overestimated and that it would not recover quickly from the defeat. Schlieffen could contemplate leaving only a small force in the east and in 1905, wrote ''War against France'' which was taken up by his successor, Moltke the Younger and became the concept of the main German war plan from {{nowrap|1906–1914.}} Most of the German army would assemble in the west and the main force would be on the right (northern) wing. An offensive in the north through Belgium and the Netherlands would lead to an invasion of France and a decisive victory. Even with the windfall of the Russian defeat in the [[Far East]] in 1905 and belief in the superiority of German military thinking, Schlieffen had reservations about the strategy. Research published by Gerhard Ritter (1956, English edition in 1958) showed that the memorandum went through six drafts. Schlieffen considered other possibilities in 1905, using war games to model a Russian invasion of eastern Germany against a smaller German army.{{sfnm|1a1=Ritter|1y=1958|1pp=1–194|2a1=Foley|2y=2007|2pp=67–70}}

In a staff ride during the summer, Schlieffen tested a hypothetical invasion of France by most of the German army and three possible French responses; the French were defeated in each but then Schlieffen proposed a French counter-envelopment of the German right wing by a new army. At the end of the year, Schlieffen played a war game of a two-front war, in which the German army was evenly divided and defended against invasions by the French and Russians, where victory first occurred in the east. Schlieffen was open-minded about a defensive strategy and the political advantages of the Entente being the aggressor, not just the "military technician" portrayed by Ritter. The variety of the 1905 war games show that Schlieffen took account of circumstances; if the French attacked [[Metz]] and [[Strasbourg]], the decisive battle would be fought in [[Lorraine]]. Ritter wrote that invasion was a means to an end not an end in itself, as did Terence Zuber in 1999 and the early 2000s. In the strategic circumstances of 1905, with the Russian army and the Tsarist state in turmoil after the defeat in [[Manchuria]], the French would not risk open warfare; the Germans would have to force them out of the border fortress zone. The studies in 1905 demonstrated that this was best achieved by a big flanking manoeuvre through the Netherlands and Belgium.{{sfn|Foley|2007|pp=70–72}}

Schlieffen's thinking was adopted as {{lang|de|Aufmarsch I}} (Deployment [Plan] I) in 1905 (later called {{lang|de|Aufmarsch I West}}) of a Franco-German war, in which Russia was assumed to be neutral and Italy and Austria-Hungary were German allies. "[Schlieffen] did not think that the French would necessarily adopt a defensive strategy" in such a war, even though their troops would be outnumbered but this was their best option and the assumption became the theme of his analysis. In {{lang|de|Aufmarsch I}}, Germany would have to attack to win such a war, which entailed all of the German army being deployed on the German–Belgian border to invade France through the southern [[Netherlands|Dutch]] province of [[Limburg (Netherlands)|Limburg]], [[Belgium]] and [[Luxembourg]]. The deployment plan assumed that [[Royal Italian Army]] and [[Austro-Hungarian Army]] troops would defend [[Alsace-Lorraine]] ({{lang|de|Elsaß-Lothringen}}).{{sfn|Zuber|2011|pp=46–49}}