Clausewitz's Influence The War Planning Before 1914

How did Clausewitz influence the war planning before 1914? Partly because none of the major powers possessed anything comparable to the United States’ National Security Council, many of their war plans did not match strategy to particular political objectives. Russia pledged itself to a rapid advance into Germany in order to help its ally France, without forecasting where that advance might stop or how it might end. Austro-Hungarian leaders seem to have failed to grasp that they would have inadequate forces to destroy Serbia unless Russia stayed out of the war until it was too late. The French Plan XVII did aim directly at France’s political objective, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. But the German general staff, acting without much political
General Colmar von der Goltz, for example, probably the most widely read commentator on Clausewitz, died in Baghdad in 1916 pursuing an "Eastern solution" to the struggle. There were some exceptions to this rule; Repington 's and Wilkinson 's wartime references to Clausewitz have already been mentioned. It is difficult, however, to detect any particular trends in the reception of Clausewitz during the war.
One thing that does seem clear is that the war brought about the virtual eclipse of Jomini. This was partly because the latter 's maneuver orientation and rather regressive attitude toward popular national warfare had relatively little relevance to the problems at hand and partly because of the obvious dominance of the German military model.
Nonetheless, the urge to apply Clausewitz 's writings in a prescriptive, Jominian fashion did not disappear; indeed, it lingers to the present day. Most representative of the efforts in this direction was Robert Matteson Johnston 's Clausewitz to Date (1917), published in a handy, pocket-sized version designed for reading under trench conditions. (1) Johnston thus became the first American to publish a significant commentary on