>> demographic changes in France - higher relative population growth I think you have it exactly backwards. France had a significantly slower population growth

>> demographic changes in France - higher relative population growth I think you have it exactly backwards. France had a significantly slower population growth. To give one example of how this impacted the military caculus: Germany was able to easily expand its army in 1911 and 1913 and still have a large reserve pool of manpower but France had to increase the term of service from 2 to 3 years and expand its conscription to almost the entire adult male population of fighting age; which led to riots and political chaos. At the time of the outbreak the French army had been expanded so rapidly that training had to be cut significantly. >> However, the types of wars in which the Great Powers of the time were involved - and from which their military planners derived their assumptions about war with modern weaponry - were mainly colonial conflicts against relatively under-armed opponents, eg. the Boer war, which the Great Powers typically "won." The outcome of the Russo-Japanese war (1904-05) was shocking enough to change the calculus for planning the European war, as Russia was now seen as a less able ally for France... and on and on such analysis could go! I would strongly disagree. Russia lost the Russo-Japanese war mostly due to inept military execution and the difficulty of troop transportation through an incomplete Trans-Siberian railway; hardly relevant to a european total war. You could argue( and some less astute observers at the time did) that Japan's victory through aggressive assaults on static russian positions 'proved' that offensive power would carry the day to a decisive conclusion.