For many years scholars studied the war plans prepared by the armed forces of Europe as evidence of long-term belligerent intent. If states planned to go to war to fulfil policy objectives, then armies and navies ought to have prepared operational plans to carry out those intentions. By the same token, when the crisis of July 1914 broke, those plans had the capacity to determine the pace and direction of the crisis in its latter stages: “war by railway timetable”, as A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990) put it.[1]
This approach suffered from three major defects. First, it assumed that states had the governmental machinery to integrate general staffs within their policy-making structures. Most did not as it required the experience of war itself for states to learn how to manage the making of strategy at the civil-military interface. Secondly, it assumed that general staffs focused upwards on the links between operations and their policy effects. In reality, they tended to look downwards to tactics and how their forces would fight. Thirdly, and consequently, the schemes that resulted from these staff exercises were not “war plans”, but campaign plans. As a result, they failed to address the real demands of a fully-fledged war plan: the need for economic mobilisation, alliance coordination, and integration across theatres and fronts and between land and sea.
Collectively, these sorts of criticism have downplayed the role of the general staffs in the coming of the war. The more recent works on the war’s origins have little to say about what sort of war states thought they might be risking in July 1914.[2] This is equally misleading. Europe did not go to war “by railway timetable”, but it had experienced arms races on land and sea, and a wave of popular and professional literature described future war. Moreover, the lack of governmental structures to manage general staffs gave those bodies leeway, which meant that what they did and said had political effect.