In August 1914, Germany’s famed General Staff system—once celebrated for its precision and intellect—launched its masterpiece, the Schlieffen Plan. Within weeks, that masterpiece collapsed.

Hope and Brian explore how the staff that once embodied “collective genius” became trapped by plan fixation—and an obsession with perfect planning. When the Austria–Serbia crisis erupted, Germany’s response wasn’t diplomacy, but a pre-scripted invasion of France through Belgium.

They trace how Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, living in his uncle’s shadow, weakened Schlieffen’s design, lost control of his armies, and stumbled into catastrophe at the Marne. Along the way, they unpack the fatal conversation between Moltke and the Kaiser, the failure of cavalry reconnaissance, and how the staff’s separation of war and politics doomed its own strategy.

The result: a brilliant system undone by its own perfectionism—and a failure Germany would repeat twenty years later in World War II.

A more detailed paper on this subject is available at: The German General Staff and the Failure of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914