Once you read enough about post-WWII Soviet military doctrine, you'll realize that the Cold War is the reason the Hot War didn't happen. Not like Vietnam and so on, but real hot.
Why? Because that doctrine was quite simple. Soviet ground forces after its adoption sucked donkey balls because they were intended to mop up what remains after nuking Europe. BMP-1 sucked donkey balls because it wasn't an armored transport, it was a protected transport. To rapidly cross rivers and swamps on irradiated terrain, while kinda protecting people inside from radiation, not from bullets even. The whole reason USSR's ground forces after WWII had a reduced peacetime component, but huge mobilization plans and mass warfare approaches, is that they were expected to die from radiation a lot, so why bank on quality.
EDIT: And contrary to the common perception, even in WWII human waves were not the tactic of choice of USSR's military. So this was a conscious change, an enormous reform. I can say I can't avoid the feeling of huge respect for people who would really tackle the numbers and warfare theory to produce such a plan to nuke half the world and possibly emerge as a victor. However, the reforms after that plan made already corrupt Soviet bureaucracy even more corrupt, and discarded experienced and principled people, recent world war veterans, from the military in droves, which long-term made USSR's failure certain. Before the post-war rebuilding and Khruschev some of its institutions and systems were still respected. Stalin's regime was horrible, but it was also less corrupt. After Stalin's death and the following events, nobody managed to say "we failed and we should sit and think". Well, Kosygin's reforms which were not completed, growth of MIC, use of soldiers and students as workforce, slow decay, KGB thieves\assassins and degenerate fascists becoming the ruling class since late 70s, the rest is known.
That's true. Ancaps love to talk how almost anything government-done can be done by private entities in the right conditions and social consensus. Turns out this is true for censorship too.
I'm completely ideology-agnostic at this point. Whatever works, works. Nothing around seems to work though.
In any case, while this is true, power goes the shortest way and power corrupts. USA is the hegemon of our world and the center of our civilization, which is now united by American English language and American technologies, and what's the worst, American corporations. Much more power goes its way to corrupt it.
You know how bad people like to grease in shit the right tools for fixing the problem, preventively? That Putinist thing about "multi-polar" world means that they want to be a little hegemon too, and to have free reign in gray zones. But there is a similar sane point.
But really decentralization of tech research and production and standards is something we all need else we vanish. Right now we have one big Internet with one set of protocols, a handful of very complex software stacks everybody uses, and this situation should already be called a centralized one. Due to network effects and other, mostly with fake argument, kinds of pressure it doesn't make sense for most people to use parallel systems.
A de-facto conglomerate of companies, social groups, interests and ideas can be a monopolist too.