A War of Position
Neither attrition, nor maneuver
The lodestar of the military staffs in the modern period has been the war of movement. Operational maneuver, enabled by the railroads, created the possibility of a war of rapid decision. Indeed, the modern period can be said to have begun with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, a classic war of movement. The campaign served as the model for the German General Staff, and specifically for Schlieffen’s famous war plan.
When the Great War broke out, the Germans implemented a modified version of the Schlieffen Plan for a war of maneuver. The stratagem failed.1 By November 1914, an unbroken line of trenches stretched from the Channel to the Swiss Alps. A brutal war of attrition would be waged for four long years. Movement would only be restored in 1918.
The interwar period fixated on the problem of the Western front. What was the logic of the war of attrition? What had caused the deadlock of trench warfare? How could movement be restored?
