Moltke kept adjusting a plan whose assumptions had expired

Moltke's response to faster Russian mobilization did not go far enough. Pulling troops east and repeatedly modifying Schlieffen's design preserved a plan whose underlying strategic assumptions no longer held. A stronger institutional response would have been to write a new war plan around current mobilization, alliance, railway, and frontier conditions. Later passages return to the same problem: inherited timetables can lock leaders into operations after the political and military setting has changed.