An article discussing the German plannnig for WWI starting in 1871

See:
http://www.strategypage.com/cic/docs/cic442b.asp
A subsequent one on French planning is mentioned.

This isn't my area of expertise at all, what do the rest of you think of it?

Here's a quote to get things moving:

 

Now that's helluva interesting. On first read, it looks like Germans expected the next war to be a re-run of 1870-1. Need to have a good delve, but here's a snippet to be going on with-
http://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/1871-1914/section2.rhtml

 

Here some plans of all major powers can be found:

For the French:


France: Plan XVII
The chief aim of Plan XVII, devised by Ferdinand Foch in the wake of the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, and taken up by French Commander-in-Chief Joseph Joffre in 1913, was the recapture of the territory of Alsace and Lorraine.
Entirely offensive in nature, Plan XVII made extensive use of the belief in the mystical élan vital assumed to be instilled within every Frenchman - a fighting spirit capable of turning back any enemy by its sheer power. It assumed the average French soldier to be more than a match for its German counterpart. Indeed, numerous French officers were dismissed from the army during the early stage of the war for a want of fighting spirit, including General Lanrezac following the French army's failure at Charleroi.
More technically, Plan XVII called for an advance by four French Armies into Alsace-Lorraine on either side of the Metz-Thionville fortresses, occupied by the Germans since 1871. The southern wing of the invasion forces would first capture Alsace and Lorraine (in that order), whilst the northern wing would - depending upon German movements - advance into Germany via the southern Ardennes forests, or else move north-east into Luxembourg and Belgium.
The architects of Plan XVII, which included Joseph Joffre, took little account of a possible German invasion of France through Belgium until just before war was declared; and in modifying the plan to deploy troops to meet such an eventuality, actual French activity to meet an invasion via Belgium was lacklustre at best in August 1914.
Before war broke out Joffre and his advisers were convinced that the threat of British involvement would keep Germany from invading through Belgium (with whom Britain had a treaty guaranteeing its neutrality; Germany regarded this as a mere "scrap of paper").
Whilst the French had accurately estimated the strength of the German army at the opening of the war, they did not place much emphasis on Germany's extensive use of reserve troops, having little faith in their own. This proved a serious miscalculation which, in conjunction with an underestimation of the Schlieffen Plan, almost led to France's undoing within a month of the outbreak of war.
Within weeks of the war's start, the French attack into Alsace and Lorraine had proved a debacle, effectively repelled by the German defences. With the inevitable advance of the Schlieffen Plan meanwhile, the French were thrown very much on the defensiv

More: http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/plans.htm

 

Became aware of this through an FB group I'm a member of.
"WW I conference papers published

William O'Neil's picture Discussion published by William O'Neil on Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Back in August 2014 a conference on WW I was held at Queen Mary College, University of London. The conference Web site is http://www.qmul.ac.uk/worldwarone/, which affords links to a compillation of abstracts of the papers read and another of a selection of the full texts.

I particularly commend attention to a paper by Terence Holmes, "Not the Schlieffen Plan, 1914," starting on page 55 of the papers collection, available at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58892137/londonww1conferencepapers.pdf.

William D. O'Neil
The Plan That Broke the World: The "Schlieffen Plan" and World War I
http://whatweretheythinking.williamdoneil.com/theplanthatbroketheworld/Index.htm "

 

It's interesting to see that the Germans considered various options, but by 1914 they had convinced themselves that the only thing they could do in any crisis was launch the assault on France via Belgium. Normally a competent general staff would have a whole shelf of plans for various contingencies, but the Germans were not prepared even to order mobilization without activating the attack.

The crisis began in the east, and the Serbian regime was just about the last cause in Europe that anyone wanted to go to war for; Tsar Nicholas found himself in the curious position of supporting the assassins of the Austrian "Tsarrevich". At one point when it appeared the western powers might remain quiescent, Kaiser Wilhelm said joyfully "Now we can deploy in the east" only to be told by von Moltke that "the movements of millions cannot be improvised"; apparently the Field Marshal was on the verge of a nervous breakdown if he had to to anything except execute the plan.

Here in the WWII forum we've heard many times about the danger to Germany of a two-front war, but, crazy as it sounds, their response to a crisis in the east was to provoke a war in the west.

From The Guns of August:

[SIZE=10pt]"When Moltke's "It cannot be done" was revealed after the war in his memoirs, General von Staab [what a name for a German staff officer], Chief of the Railway Division, was so incensed by what he considered a reproach upon his bureau that he wrote a book to prove it could have been done. In pages of charts and graphs he demonstrated how, given notice on August 1, he could have deployed four out of the seven armies to the Eastern Front by August 15, leaving three to defend the West."[/SIZE]

Moltke himself later acknowledged:

"within six months of the event....that the assault on France at the beginning was a mistake and instead "the larger part of our army ought first to have been sent East to smash the Russian steam roller, limiting operations in the West to beating off the enemy's attack on our frontier.""