structural:scholar_edition, structural:summarization, quality:correction, quality:corruption, structural:reformatting
Effects on military thought

The events of the Franco-Prussian War had great influence on military thinking over the next forty years. Lessons drawn from the war included the need for a general staff system, the scale and duration of future wars and the tactical use of artillery and cavalry. The bold use of artillery by the Prussians, to silence French guns at long range and then to directly support infantry attacks at close range, proved to be superior to the defensive doctrine employed by French gunners. Likewise, the war showed that breech-loading cannons were superior to muzzle-loaded cannons, just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 had demonstrated for rifles. The Prussian tactics and designs were adopted by European armies by 1914, exemplified in the French 75, an artillery piece optimised to provide direct fire support to advancing infantry. Most European armies ignored the evidence of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 which suggested that infantry armed with new smokeless-powder rifles could engage gun crews effectively in the open. This forced gunners to fire at longer range using indirect fire, usually from a position of cover. The heavy use of fortifications and dugouts in the Russo-Japanese war also greatly undermined the usefulness of field artillery which was not designed for indirect fire.

At the Battle of Mars-La-Tour, the Prussian 12th Cavalry Brigade, commanded by General Adalbert von Bredow, conducted a charge against a French artillery battery. The attack was a costly success and came to be known as "von Bredow's Death Ride", but which nevertheless was held to prove that cavalry charges could still prevail on the battlefield. Use of traditional cavalry on the battlefields of 1914 proved to be disastrous, due to accurate, long-range rifle fire, machine-guns and artillery. Bredow's attack had succeeded only because of an unusually effective artillery bombardment just before the charge, along with favorable terrain that masked his approach.

A third influence was the effect on notions of entrenchment and its limitations. While the American Civil War had famously involved entrenchment in the final years of the war, the Prussian system had overwhelmed French attempts to use similar tactics. With Prussian tactics seeming to make entrenchment and prolonged offensive campaigns ineffective, the experience of the American Civil War was seen as that of a musket war, not a rifle war. Many European armies were convinced of the viability of the " cult of the offensive " because of this, and focused their attention on aggressive bayonet charges over infantry fire. These would needlessly expose men to artillery fire in 1914, and entrenchment would return with a vengeance.