New Airplanes in WWI (ISOT)

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote

A sudden decisive air domination means that the allies have
no arial recon ability. Just that alone could change battles.

Debatable - neither side had useful air recon in 1914, but nobody
seriously suggests this affected events. Also, you can do air recon
over a trench system from a balloon, and you don't need fighters to
defend balloons. You just need to protect them with artillery whose
fuses are pre-set to the height at which an attacking scout would
approach.

A few hundred Fokker D-VIIs would secure air supremacy for whichever
side had them, but I question whether this would change land battles.
AFAIK Germany had air superiority for much of the war, and this didn't
materially alter outcomes on the ground.

A fighter from the 1920s can knock out railroad lines
and bridges, which is a large logistics problem.

Which 1920s fighters could lift, and deliver accurately, a payload
large enough to destroy a militarily-useful bridge? Dive-bombing was
invented in the late 1920s largely because bombloads were so small
that you needed either a huge air force, or direct hits, to cause
worthwhile damage. It was the 1940s before small, agile aircraft
became powerful enough to lift a decent payload - Hurricanes armed
with rockets, for instance. Once you had 1,000hp engines, a lot of
things became possible. I can't see a 1,000hp engine much earlier than
when they did arrive - the mid-1930s.

Even if you think the French can overcome these problems, I doubt the
Russians and/or Serbs can. An early fall of Russia gives Germany the
war.

German war planning was the actually other way around though:
seven-eighths of their forces attacked France because the
Schlieffen-Moltke Plan said that that was how you beat Russia. You
beat France first. If you weren't at war with France, well, you
gratuitously took steps to make sure you were, by demanding insulting
guarantees of neutrality.

The Schlieffen-Moltke Plan further specified that you defeated France
by violating Belgian neutrality. Britain specifically asked Germany in
July 1914 whether she would respect Belgian neutrality in a war with
France. Germany refused to do so, because the Schlieffen Plan could
not be modified, so you invaded Belgium even if this resulted in war
with Britain.

Thus, German doctrine in 1914 effectively was that the best chance of
beating Russia was to go to war simultaneously with Russia, France,
and Britain.

Sure, it's not the nuclear weapons of World War One, but the war
was such a close thing that the teeter-totter can be made to fall
the other way.

Unfortunately, including France and Britain in the war ensured defeat;
and the trench stalemate proved impossible for Germany to break even
after Russia was eventually removed from the allied line-up.