First, there is the knowledge problem. Even in the information age, with instantaneous video and audio surveillance of events on the ground, it is impossible for a leader to know what is really happening. For one thing, events are occurring in too many places at once for any one person to monitor, let alone understand. Moreover, a great deal of the information available to leaders is either uncertain, false, or flatly contradictory. Third, things simply happen at far too brisk a pace for any one person to stay on top of them. A conclusion drawn at one moment often becomes, by virtue of constantly changing circumstances, obsolete in the next. Putin's knowledge of Ukraine was before the war, is now during the war, and will after the war remain highly doubtful.

Tolstoy ridiculed the notion that wars, battles, or even skirmishes can be executed as planned. It is not simply a matter of our inability to organize events as complex as military confrontations, but also our inability to know in advance, in the heat of battle, or even after actions have receded into memory what counts as an event. In War and Peace, Tushin, a lowly captain of a cannon battery, valiantly holds the center of the Russian line at the Battle of Shoengrabern but ends up being unjustly berated for leaving cannons behind, even though he did more than anyone else for the Russian cause.

Hayek's economic arguments about the limits and pretense of knowledge also hold sway in the military and political spheres. "Central planning cannot take direct account of particular circumstances of time and place. Additionally, every individual has important bits of information which cannot possibly be conveyed to a central authority."

It is not just that Putin and his generals cannot know and respond in a timely fashion to what is happening on the battlefield. They cannot even know before an invasion whether their equipment, troops, and plans are adequately prepared, a problem exacerbated in authoritarian systems by the general reluctance of subordinates to bear unwelcome news.

The control problem is equally thorny. A political or military leader can issue orders, but it is highly unlikely that many orders will be carried out or even merit obedience. Leaders often think of themselves in terms of Adam Smith's "man of system," who

seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the difference pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own....

Kutuzov, Tolstoy's model of a great general, understands that the real world is far different. He knows that his own will is a small thing in comparison to the course of events. He knows that "it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he knows that the result of a battle is not decided by the orders of the commander-in-chief, nor the place where troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or slaughtered men." To the extent that Napoleon thinks that battles and history could be the product of his own will, he is not a hero or a world historical figure, but a pompous fool. He does not see and describe what happens, but only how he wishes it had happened.