The recency of the modern German military tradition

Had lunch with an old friend yesterday and had a wonderfully free-ranging conversation.  At some point we got to a discussion of the relative performance of the Ukrainian and Russian militaries in their current war.  We both accepted the Western bromide that the strength and capability of any army is highly contingent in the strength of its NCO ranks.  

The Russians historically have had, and currently have, very weak NCOs and that is likely part of their challenge and why they always end up in a war of artillery, attrition and meat-grinder engagements.  Their hierarchy command-and-control is weak in terms of local decision-making (sergeants and lieutenants) and weak at filtering useful information up.  The orders come down and that is about it.  

The Ukrainians obviously share that Russian military history up until their independence in 1991.  I am not deeply familiar with their military evolutions since then but I understand whatever reforms they might have been making, that these were greatly accelerated when Russia occupied Ukrainian Crimea in 2014.

In this war, Ukraine seems to be demonstrating a clear break from their old Russian military heritage into a much stronger, more effective western style military institution, leveraging autonomous local decision-making and intelligence gathering, apparently dependent on a strong NCO model.

The conversation then swung to the experience of Russian military tradition against the NCO-strong German military in World War I and World War II.  

I made the declaration that we should not forget just how recent has been the evolution of the German military and asserted that it had been evolved during the period when Germany was consolidating and in the Age of Enlightenment tradition.  In other words, the newly consolidating German leadership of the mid- and late nineteenth century treated war as a science to be researched and learned.

I felt the statement to be true when I made it, taking into account the shock victory of Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1.  An outcome of this war was a European awareness of the military modernity of the North German Confederation.  I was taking that as how recent was the development of German military institutional design.

It was the sort of assertion, not in itself either pivotally central to the conversation nor hugely controversial.  We moved on in the conversation.

As I was driving home though, it occurred to me.  Was I wrong?  The Prussians were famously the last minute decisive element in the victory at the Battle of Waterloo and that was in 1815.  Was the origin of the German military institution nearly sixty years earlier than I had indicated?  Was it a less methodoical and scientific exercise than I had characterized it?

Reassuringly, I think I was originally correct.  In 1815, Germany was still a loose assemblage and occasional confederation of five Kingdoms, six Grand Duchies, six Principalities, six Duchies and innumerable smaller entities.  

The Battle of Waterloo was fought by two armies, one being the British led coalition which included Nassau, Hanover, and Brunswick from among the German nations.  The other army was the Prussian army under General von Blücher.  While Prussia was the single largest domain among the German polities, it was not yet the governing model.

The consolidation of Germany followed gradually in the decades after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and the Treaty of Paris.  

The foundation of the German military traditions really began in the 1850s or so.  German and Prussian observers were on both sides of the American Civil War, incorporating lessons of modern industrial warfare back to Germany.  Prussians were also involved in the emergence of Japan after Perry's mission.  Further, there were German advisors and observers in India in much of the second half of the nineteenth century as Britain consolidated its hold on the various kingdoms there.

In all these cases, the German advisers and observers were often hand-in-glove with German arms sellers.  Regardless, Germany was gaining much practical knowledge from the experiences of other nations as they modernized and industrialized their militaries throughout the later 19th century.