[icegreentea2]

"Fighting siege warfare" means that both sides can expect to "win" by doing nothing and sitting in their defenses. It's unclear if this really applies to WW1 Western Front.

Perhaps Germany was in a position were it was happy to sit in their trenches and just endure, but France was not. France had to be able to compel Germany to come to terms and restore French territory (which we should also remember contained a good chunk of French industry). While the blockade of Germany was clearly effective, it's not clear to this day (and certainly would not have been clear to the western allies at the time) if the blockade alone could have compelled Germany to terms.

And certainly the western allies DID attempt to strategically outflank Germany. It just... didn't really work.

WW1 generals understood sieges. They generally understood what fortifications could and could not do. There's a reason the Belgiums kept building forts. There's a reason why Germany built ever bigger artillery. WW1 generals got to see the Russo-Japanese war 10 years ago. They got to see a 6 month siege of Port Arthur. They got to see the ridiculous causalities that modern weapons could inflict. But they also saw something - the attack WORKED. The costs were awful, but the Japanese achieved their goals.

[pdpi]

> "Fighting siege warfare" means that both sides can expect to "win" by doing nothing and sitting in their defenses. It's unclear if this really applies to WW1 Western Front.

The problem with a siege isn't that you win by doing nothing, it's that the attacker always loses, hard, by trying a head-on assault. The really novel aspect of trench warfare is that you had both sides in a fortified highly-defensible position at the same time.

[ghaff]

Yes, and of course after WWI the French in particular largely took the lesson that forts work; they just need to be bigger, better, and more numerous.