Brose, E. D. The Kaiser’s Army

Brose, E. D. The Kaiser’s Army: The Politics of Military Technology during the Machine Age: 1870-1918, Oxford University Press, 2004.
ISBN-10: 0195179455

The book is especially interesting by its insights into decision-making in the German High Command on the eve of the First World War. It contributes to understanding of the factors, which led to the disastrous decisions of 1914 from the organizational and technological standpoints.
Problems with a book are numerous and are listed below. The book is poorly organized; sometimes personalities are mentioned but only later the author explains who they are. Organization of the German defense establishment is not explained so it is almost impossible to follow offices and people. Tables and charts would help.
Conceptual problems are equally great. The author identifies technological innovation with “progress” and military efficiency. This is plain wrong: some of the technological innovations described in the book were obviously impractical such as “G-device.” German super-long-range guns (“Big Bertha”) actually appeared on the battlefield in 1870, not in 1914, and did not become a harbinger of new era, but rather represented a technological dead end.
Germany lost the war not because of poor preparedness and technological conservatism of the military, as the author professes. In fact, it was better prepared than its main adversaries. German political objectives were impossible to achieve from the beginning. Germany in 1914 simply lacked economical and human resources to dominate the rest of the world. Once Germany could not prevent a tripartite alliance between Britain, France and Russia, the defeat or costly stalemate at best were the only possible outcomes. Sheer sizes of the British and Russian Empires, and more or less automatic involvement of the US on the British side and Italy against Austro-Hungary, allowed the Entente to continue fight as long as it was necessary to exhaust Central Powers.
Even the fall of France as a result of German Blitzkrieg in 1914 would hardly change the outcome, as demonstrated by the events of the Second World War. Even the collapse of Russian Empire, which, by the way, in 1900 was much harder to imagine that almost simultaneous collapse of Austro-Hungary, did not influence the dynamic that much. There are credible judgments of historians, that, because of confiscatory economic policies in the occupied territories and total lack of realization, by Hindenburg and Ludendorf, what it required to maintain the infrastructure to store and transport forced requisitions in the enemy territory, Germany had to maintain occupation force by approximately the same or even larger number of troops as were needed for the active phase of combat.
My verdict is that the book is interesting and thought-provoking reading, but it is hardly convincing in its main argument.