1914 Revisited: Allies, Offense, and Instability

1914 Revisited Allies, Offense, and Instability Scott D. Sagan T h e origins of the First World War continue to be of great interest today because there are a number of striking similarities between the events of 1914 and contemporary fears about paths by which a nuclear war could begin. July 1914 was a brinksmanship crisis, resulting in a war that everyone was willing to risk but that no one truly wanted. During the crisis, the political leaderships' understanding of military operations and control over critical war preparations were often tenuous at best. In 1914, the perceived incentives to strike first, once war was considered likely, were great, and the rapidity and inflexibility of offensive war plans limited the time available to diplomats searching for an acceptablepoliticalsolution to the crisis. In a world in which the possibility of massive nuclear retaliationhas made the deliberate,premeditated initiation of nuclear war unlikely, there is widespread concern that a repetition of the Sarajevo scenario may occur: an apparently insignificantincident sparkingthrough a dangerous mixture of miscalculations, inadvertent escalation, and loss of control over events-a tragic and unintended war.' Indeed, for a student of the July crisis, even specificphrases in the current nuclear debate can be haunting: what former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown meant to be a comfortingmetaphor, that the Soviet Union would never risk its society on "a cosmicthrow of the dice," is less reassuring to those who recall German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg's statement, "If the iron dice are now to be rolled, may God help us," made just hours before Germany declared war against Russia on August 1, 1914.2 I would like to thank Robert Art, Stanley Hoffmann, JackLevy, and Edward Rhodes for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Scott D. Sagan is a Lecturer in the Government Department, Harvard University. 1. Recent discussions of nuclear strategythat u&e the 1914analogyincludeGrahamT. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls (New York Norton, 1985), especially pp. 210-217; Paul J. Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 222-223, 239-240; and Miles Kahler, "Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy,"Foreign Affairs, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Winter 1979-80). 2. Harold Brown, Department of Defense Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2979 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.Government Printing Office, 1978),p. 63; and Karl Kautsky, ed., Outbreak of the World War: Intonationnl Security, Fall 1986 (Vol. 11, No.2) 0 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. 151 Znternational Security I 152 Prior to 1914, the general staffs of each of the European great powers had designed elaborate and inflexible offensive war plans, which were implemented in a series of mobilizations and countermobilizations at the end of the July crisis. In August, all the continental powers took the offensive: the Germans attacked across Belgium and Luxembourg into France; the French army launched a massive assault against German positions in Alsace-Lorraine ; and the Russian army, although not yet fully mobilized, immediately began simultaneous offenses against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In retrospect , the war plans of the great powers had disastrous political and military consequences. The negative political consequences were seen at the cabinetmeetings during the Julycrisis, for the pressures to begin mobilization and launch offensives promptly, according to the military timetables, contributed greatly to the dynamic of escalation and the political leaderships’ loss of freedom of action. In Berlin, for example, as Bethmann-Hollweg frankly admitted to the Prussian Ministry of State, once the Russians began to mobilize, “control had been lost and the stone had started r~lling.”~ The military consequences were seen on the battlefield. Each of the major offensive campaigns was checked or repulsed with enormous costs: some 900,000 men were missing, taken prisoner, wounded, or dead by the end of 1914.4 Historians and political scientists have long sought to understand why the great powers all had offensive military doctrines when the military technology of 1914-barbed wire, machine guns, and railroads-appears to have favored the defense. The popular explanation is that European soldiers and statesmen blithely ignored the demonstrations of...