Editing Schlieffen Plan (section)

====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}}