Capitalism and brutal economics were the first reason he gave for his strategy. Citing the “strength of the armies, the expense of keeping them provisioned, the expense of keeping them under arms, the interruption of trade and transportation, combined with the speed of troop organisation” he claimed a swift conclusion to any war as being imperative. He claimed that such expense would force any belligerent power to launch an attack within eight days of mobilisation and that mobilisation was irreversibly the route to open warfare as noone could afford casual mobilisation and demobilisation.
The technological edge to Moltke’s claims came from the advances under Napoleon in rifled barrels and breach loaded weapons, which meant that the old days of bayonet warfare, made possible by the inaccuracy, short range and lengthy reloading time of a musket disappeared, and the advances that would follow. Moltke saw the old frontal attack patterns against massed infantry as futile and that outflanking was the only means of attacking such a position, such as with the Austrian position at Koeniggratz. This strategy was applied at every turn; the Schlieffen Plan being a massive encirclement of the supposedly impregnable Belfort=Verdun line.
Although Moltke in 1890 warned of seven year or thirty year wars, this was never of any consequence for his strategy as he was merely brooding over the French fortifications as opposed to making any real assertion about the future of warfare in Europe. Moltke was joined by Schlieffen and Tirpitz in viewing war as a temporal pause for the economy that must be kept to a minimum. Hence the three rejected the idea of economic mobilisation, and thus the idea of a ‘medium length’ war. With neither country having the power to break a deadlock, nor the economy to mount a resurgence, the three great strategists of the turn of the century were advocating what would result in attrition.
Moltke’s concept of quick war was in keeping with the traditional lines of German thinking, from Frederick’s “bref et vif” war, but Frederick’s ideas were based on a need to end the war quickly as the army could not be maintained for long by the cottage industries of the time in Germany, especially when in competition with countries with a more advanced metre of capitalism.
