I don't think you even refuted that a "schlieffen plan" actually existed in that specific article, brah.
Anyway, i'm still going to refer to a schlieffen plan as something that existed. Nothing i've read or said to this point has compelled me to think otherwise.
Possibly because you didn't read the article and the subsequent discussion in that thread. Skimming doesn't really qualify.
So when was it decided who was going where for the campaign, and do we have a record of that decision? I mean, during the Cold War we always had a reasonably detailed plan for what would happen: a wall of men moves West from the big country over there, and if it goes our way 1 Corps pitches in to hold the line on the North German Plain while we get all excited, pretend it's 1944 again and get ready to sew some battle honours onto our colours. It would have been a pretty big risk to have left all that planning until the point at which we realised that the Russians were coming our way.
If there had been no idea whatsoever about anything that would've happened during the campaign, they could never have deployed their troops. Insofar as the General Staff made "war plans" they were focused overwhelmingly on the process of mobilization and deployment. And in order to do that, there was a vague outline of how operations would proceed. We don't know what this outline was, because the
Aufmarsch for 1914 was destroyed by British bombing during the Second World War. All we have is prior years' war plans, and the
post facto arguments of various participant officers, and the course of events during the campaign itself.
Going by the numbers of deployed forces in various locations and the equipment available to same, it
seems clear that the main effort was to be directed in the center and/or the right, with the center notably containing more troops than the right wing. The center clearly was designed to mass east of Metz-Diedenhofen and fight a defensive-offensive battle against the French main effort. The right was clearly intended to go on the offensive in Belgium. The purpose of that right wing attack remains unclear - was it the main effort, designed to operationally outflank the French armies; was it the main effort, but directed against Paris instead for political reasons; or was it a secondary effort, designed to counter the Anglo-French left and fix forces that otherwise could have harmed the center?
Some of this stuff would have been sketched out beforehand, obviously, because the Germans would have to have some idea of what to deploy where. But a clockwork, hour-by-hour plan as famously argued in the works of the midcentury authors would have been idiotic and counter to the whole nature of the war as the German military understood it, a war that would be fought in fog and friction. Anything more than vagueries past a certain point would have to be shelved anyway. It's not really that comparable to NATO's planned defense of Germany, because it's much more possible to plan a defensive campaign ahead of time than an offensive one - prepared defenses, phase lines for withdrawal, and you already have the avenues of enemy attacks mapped out beforehand anyway. Fundamentally, the Germans would have to send their armies to various places based on where the French and British ended up putting
their armies, and it's very hard to figure that out before the campaign actually starts.
Schlieffen's whole idea of "the modern Alexander" was, after all, not somebody who just set his armies in motion and let the plan take care of the rest. His supreme commander was a man armed with a staff, innumerable telephones and wireless machines, capable of keeping contact with his armies and directing them from a vast electronic nexus behind the lines. Schlieffen's war would have been one where the Chief of the General Staff's headquarters would make the decisions based on the way the campaign
was going, not how the General Staff
had thought the war would go a few years ago.
Or, basically, what you said in the second half of your post.
