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Comment by JCSato | Hacker News Reader

Highly recommend you check out The Great War series on Youtube. Even if you just watch the prologue to the war videos, very informative on how WW1 got kicked off.

Short answer: nationalism and a lot of treaties and grudges from past wars.

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I saw a history documentary on the BBC many, many years ago where the historian was describing that the reason WWI started was because of railway timetables - basically moving all those troops and material was a logistical nightmare. Once the armies were assembled it was going to be impossibly difficult to move them all back so they got put into action instead. Most likely the historian was AJP Taylor: http://www.ae.metu.edu.tr/~evren/history/texts/taylor1.htm

  Once the armies were assembled it was going to be
  impossibly difficult to move them all back so they got
  put into action instead.

I read a more subtle theory in the book "Arms and Influence" by Thomas C. Schelling [1].

In short, at the start of WW1, the Russians had two plans available: A plan to mobilise against the Austro-Hungarians only, and a plan to mobilise against them and the Germans at the same time.

But if they went for the Austria-Hungary-only plan, they'd be extra-vulnerable to German attack. After all, the troops and trains are all in the wrong place!

So although they were _mostly_ worried about Austria-Hungary, they were moderately worried about Germany, so they went with the mobilise-against-both plan. And as soon as Russia started massing troops at the German border, what could Germany do except respond in kind? Hence there was an escalation to war despite the fact neither side would benefit from it.

In other words: The logistics played a part, but it wasn't _just_ using the troops because they're here now - the logistics forced the Russians to choose between two bad options, forcing them into a choice that would inevitably trigger the escalation to war.

[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TX_yAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT161&lp...

The accompanying theory is that Germany had long planned for the eventuality of fighting a Franco-Russian alliance, and their agreed military strategy for dealing with this potential situation was to attack France first, in the hope that they could knock France out the war before Russia was fully mobilised. The need for speed in executing this plan necessitated an attack via neutral Belgium to avoid France's border forts and easily defensible territory (which was what brought Belgian ally Britain into the war)

Dan Carlin's Countdown to Armageddon also gets into these aspects in detail. The basic argument is that a number of factors, including technology at a macro level and logistics at a more micro level set various policies and machinery in motion that was difficult to stand down once it got moving.

Automatisms quite unlike like the various doomsday machines dreamt up during the cold war, just running on diplomatic and logistic commitments rather than on transistors and logic programming. I think that much of the institutionalized sabre rattling was seen by some contemporary experts as a guarantee for peace, in a proto-mutually-assured-destruction kind of way.

> I think that much of the institutionalized sabre rattling was seen by some contemporary experts as a guarantee for peace, in a proto-mutually-assured-destruction kind of way

Contemporary experts also claimed that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."

This is one reason I find the modern argument for MAD to be insane. Conflict escalates, despite it being a negative-sum game.

Still they were right on both points, their failure was in the implicit assumption that all wars are started to gain something.

The argument doesn't hold up terribly well to the evidence. The Austrian ultimatum was timed to be delivered just after the French prime minister left Russia and was effectively unable to participate in emergency conferences for three days, and by all accounts Austria was committed to war by the time the ultimatum was sent. When Russia mobilized, the tsar ordered a partial mobilization effort that wasn't even in the military's plans, and it took well over 24 hours for the military to change his mind.

A good military commander needs to be able to adjust plans on the fly to circumstances anyways, and while the logistical hurdles would have been substantial. Mobilization itself takes the form of several stages, and it's possible to hold at certain stages for lengthy (in comparison to the crisis) periods of times. Military commanders would certainly have objected strenuously, but politicians could have overridden them if necessary.

The real truth is that, by the July Crisis, most of the politicians weren't trying to avoid war anymore. Certainly not in Germany, which is the only case where the timetable argument comes close to applying.

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