Despite his advanced age, Alfred von Schlieffen personally oversaw the implementation of his plan for two-front war in 1914, leading a strong right-wing advance through Belgium and France, despite the quick invasion from Russia. France and Britain immediately sued for peace, and Russia was in turn defeated.
In 1881 and 1882, Alfred von Schlieffen served as his country's military attache to the United States and had the opportunity to observe firsthand the American prosecution of the Second Mexican War. (During the evacuation of Washington, DC he nearly killed Nellie Semphroch inadvertently.) He observed firsthand Orlando Wilcox's disastrous siege of Louisville, Kentucky. He was shocked by the incompetence he witnessed on every level of the badly run and badly organized US Army, and was disappointed that he was able to find nothing in the US's strategy which he could recommend that his own army adopt.
Schlieffen also recognized a potential military power in the US with its large population and enviable industrial capacity. He further recognized that, in Britain and France, the US and Germany had common enemies. He became an early advocate of the Teuto-American alliance which eventually became the Central Powers. His postwar discussions with American General-in-ChiefWilliam Rosecrans enabled the latter to see that the decentralized army he commanded made strategic coordination on multiple fronts a near-impossibility and that the US would do better to adopt a command structure on the Prussian general staff model. It was this reorganization which finally allowed the US to tap its military resources and win the Great War.
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