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alternatehistory.com
In our timeline, the European powers in 1914 thought World War I would be a simple affair based upon the short wars that took place in Europe such as the Franco-Prussian War and developed their strategies accordingly. However, European nations had sent military observers to foreign conflicts such as the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War (two wars which foreshadowed the kind of fighting seen in World War I) and those observers wrote down what they saw. These wars foreshadowed what would be seen in World War I:
Trenches (Both)
Submarines (ACW)
Barbed wire (ACW)
Defending entrenched positions with machine guns and artillery (RJW)
The American Civil War, in particular, showed how quickly a small war could evolve into a much more fierce and deadly one.
However, these reports were dismissed out of hand, either out of the view that the ACW was too 'exotic' to base strategies of, or out of pure racism in the case of the Russo-Japanese War.
But what if the Europeans were more open-minded and looked to these wars for inspiration for strategies in World War I rather than wars which were happening in their own backyard? How different would World War I be?