I know that this is all in hindsight, but what does it matter? We are not limited to information the Germans had in 1914.
no but the Germans were!
Plus as mentioned in the link posted by
@NoMommsen, even Moltke said that the assumptions on the Schlieffen plan were incorrect by 1914 - they knew that Russian mobilization would not take two months. So it was a weird decision even at the time considering that information - maybe there was some organizational inertia behind it?
Yes quite likely, I also think that teh changing situation at teh time swept the plan along as well, such is the nature of military pre-planning and politics
Of course I haven't shown what I haven't claimed. I have never claimed that Germany could beat Russia quickly and then win in the West, as in marching to Paris. On the contrary, I claimed that Germany shouldn't even try to win quickly, as that was a doomed proposition to begin with.
and you keep ignoring the issues with a long war
however to repeat again
since you still haven't shown that beating Russia quickly and then wining in the west is a more likely alternative, your alternative isn't better.
I think the problem here is you are looking at OTL and thinking their plan failed and because it failed therefore there must have been a different better plan to follow. Only that's an assumption.
(Of course assuming that OTL decisions are inherently the best ones is also an assumption, but I still haven't seen the glaringly obvious thing the German high command missed here that makes either the East first option a better option or the west first option as initially planned* a certain failure).
*As I said in a recent thread, the Germans are kind caught in their own trap here. They have a plan, that plan was based on certain assumptions two big ones being we cut through Belgium and the Belgian's (and the rest of the world) are fine with that. They then make political moves with that in mind. Only after they have made a lot of pollical moves, many of which they would find unpalatable to walk back from, they find out that those two assumptions are wrong (amongst others).
So they can either:
1). back the fuck down, but well lots of reason against doing this
2). Suddenly come up with a brand new plan, only the last week of July 1914 is really not the time to be doing that
3). grit their teeth, take the risk and go for it hoping for the best, hoping maybe they get lucky and the French are as shit as they were 40 year prior, hope the shop keepers are blustering, hope the spirit of Bismarck is smiling on them (it's not, Bismarck would have been spinning in his grave while shouting I told you so)
It is also a weird assumption that OTL decisions are inherently the best ones - on the contrary, that shouldn't be the case, as in hindsight we can have a more accurate assessment of the situation as we have more information.
But hindsight in worthless for assessing those decisions as they were made, and as I said it not like they didn't look at the east first option.
Do you have any evidence that the Germans chose the best possible plan at the moment?
Do you have any evidence that your plan is better? (Going west doesn't have to be the best plan ever it just has to be better than yours in this comparison) and see above
What happened, happened because they chose to do what they did, not due to some historical inevitability. Unlike WW2, WW1 was not unwinnable for the Central Powers, and going East is a radical change to the war, to such degree that there's no way the war would be a carbon copy of OTL.
And yet you are the one suggesting a long war, and you still have addressed the issues with that
Reichstag was only controlling the legislature, while Kaiser and the military governed the government and as such the foreign policy - hardly a democracy. Unless I'm mistaken, Britain and France were democracies even in modern sense at the time.
Oh I agree there's definitely a spectrum, but you could make a similar point about controlling foreign policy etc elsewhere and stuff like general elections being suspended during the war in the UK, but again do you think the entente didn't go with nationalism or do you think the Germans are somehow super nationalistically motivated?
this idea that western democracies are won't fight when it comes to it (and that was the initiating claim here) get trotted out all the time but never really supported.
Especially as what happen OTL? The Germans may have won in the east but they lost the overall war of attrition, and so we go back to short war vs. long war.
On the large, Germans were still doing more offensives than Entente.
I can't be bothered to tot them up, but the entente were launching plenty of their own
Also, OTL Germany sitting on 25% France is just false. As mentioned earlier in this thread, it was just 4% or so.
Sorry yes you are right it's about 8% of the pre-war population and 25% of pre-war industrial capability / raw material isn't it.