zlacker

I like to expand the though "strong leadership from the top will always be optimal" with what it's optimizing for. It has benefits for speed and specificity; as long as the chains of communication are open and clear, what the group should be doing is easy to understand. That's much muddier in a distributed leadership system.

And, of course, that centralization carries good and ill. At different points in time, it can be detrimental to centralize authority so. But even countries like the United States, which generally pride themselves on decentralized democratic rule, have various emergency powers abilities for wartime consolidation of authority behind the Executive (and President specifically).

Apart from that note, I agree with everything here.