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Let me explain my polemic . Open poster voiced the questions that arise for everyone, studying the Russian-Japanese war for the first time. I answered sarcastically and provocatively, hinting that the answers to these questions lie in a completely different plane. In particular, studying the course of the war sooner or later leads to the question why did the Russian army (75% of whose soldiers could not read before being drafted into the army) end up on the Liaodong peninsula in northeast China?
As for your question, the course of the war was dictated by the decisions taken by the monstrously inefficient management system of the Russian Empire. On the one hand, within the framework of the Franco-Russian alliance, the Russian Empire had been preparing for war with Germany for several decades (by the way, Russia's largest trading partner at that time, evaluate the quality of the strategy!) and concentrated the largest and best part of the army in eastern Europe (83% of the personnel in 1900). On the other hand, these same people began a rapid expansion in China, since 1898 predicting an inevitable war with Japan. After the outbreak of war unexpectedly (!) it turned out that it was urgently necessary to transport troops and supplies to northeast China through the whole of Russia on a single single-track railway! But one way or another, all these are small uninteresting details described by the term institutional backwardness.