"Schlieffen, Superstar of Military Planning" Topic

"t is the fate of military plans to be forgotten once the operation is over. Yet the Schlieffen Plan, a German plan used in World War I, lives on in historical writing, a superstar of planning. In December 1905, Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1905 wrote his "Great Memorandum" which proposed that the German army invade France through Belgium. This plan was far more ambitious than Schlieffen's previous plans. It certainly required more soldiers, including what historians refer to as "ghost divisions," entire divisions that Germany didn't actually have. Kaiser Wilhelm II was no doubt pleased. He had a boyish enthusiasm for proposals that involved invasion or conquest. After all, making it work wasn't Schlieffen's problem. He was on his way out as chief of the General Staff. All he had to do was turn a deployment plan over his successor, Helmuth von Moltke, who seems to have done very little with it for the next four years.

Why is this plan so well remembered today? A major factor was Schlieffen's curious attitude toward operational security. He wrote an article describing his plan entitled "War of Today," which was published in the 1909. (Schlieffen, 194-205) This version of the plan was even more ambitious than the one handed to Moltke in 1906. "When you march into France," he wrote, "let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve." That is to say, the plan imagined a block of German soldiers advancing that would stretch from the English Channel to the Swiss border…"

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