Military organizations engage in hybrid warfare when, having expected and prepared to wage a particular form of war, they find themselves compelled simultaneously to wage another type. One may also understand the concept as a historical fault line, along which shifting social, economic, cultural, and technological forces grate and combine in new and unanticipated ways, leading to the rise of new forms of warfare. Such concepts describe the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 particularly well, but they also apply in varying degrees to almost every major war fought since the dawn of recorded history.

The war that culminated the long process of German unification incorporated institutions and ideas deeply infused with eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century understandings of limited force and its utility; it also displayed important early indications of the factors that would prove decisive after 1914 – mass mobilization and industrial potential, force application across a spectrum of intensity, and a stronger emphasis on absolute aims and outcomes in the face of popular enthusiasms. And like most hybrid wars throughout history, the Franco-Prussian War proved conceptually frustrating to a generation of officers compelled to make sense of its intellectual inheritance.