Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke
The picture is of Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke -- the man who used the German rail net to defeat the Danes, the Austrians and the French in the era of Bismark. Moltke, a product of the Prussian military reform movement, in my opinion represents one of the first active military intellectuals who transformed warfare into a real science. A type of soldier-intellectual.
From what I have seen of this forum, the Wehrmacht receives far too much attention. Officers such as Manstein or Guderian stood on the shoulders of giants. I could not find a good picture of the mightiest giant. Scharnhorst more so than Moltke or even Clausewitz represented the first real military thinker and revolutionized his field in the manner of a Newton. The issue for Scharnhorst was how to duplicate the skills of Napoleon or Friedrich II using a staff structure that devoted itself to the study of war using historical methodology. Clausewitz refined the material into a massive book. Moltke employed these ideas to great success. Cool stuff, indeed. In any case, Wehrmacht generals used experience to adapt operational tactics. This process represented over a century of hard thinking on the subject.
Who is more important? The man who builds a better wheel or the man who invents it?
Ollie Garchy