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. German officers and military theorists explained the hybrid war transition in terms of an epochal shift from Kabinettskriege to Volkskriege, or popular war. 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. German officers deserve much of the blame for the cultural conceits that reinforced Germany's strategic posture. The basic problem of strategic culpability at the highest levels of decision making and social militarism at the lowest was strongly influenced by the high profile the German officer corps enjoyed, to be sure, but that fact should not obscure that the officer corps was not, in the end, the arbiter of Germany's fate.