Why do countries need capitals?
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Its a matter of proximity speeding decision making and actions being taken.
While many things that governments do, involve communications being sent in the normal fashion, there are some discussions that will always have to be conducted in person, either for the sake of transparency (for example, the affairs of Parliament in the UK), or for the sake of maintaining operational security in the event of a crisis (meetings between secret intelligence service, law enforcement and government ministers during terror attacks and the like).
When decisions need making quickly, as in the example of meetings between the intelligence services, police, and government ministers during a terror attack, or meetings between the intelligence services, armed services representatives and government during a war, the nature of the communications between the heads of the branches of government involved, is often such that doing it remotely takes too long, and exposes the information within those communications, to too much risk of being distributed more broadly than is necessarily safe.
In times of crisis, it is often necessary to ensure that only the people you want to know a thing, know the thing. The best way to ensure that, is to gather those people and only those people in one spot, and have them work things out between them, each going away with a clear idea of what they are doing, without exposing the communication to outside observation.
This hasn’t REALLY changed that much in a good long time, as reasons for having a capital go. The only difference is that this has become the primary reason, whereas the main reason used to be having a place where the Queen or King could be secured in place, with access to their most important subjects, its now more of an issue of efficiency in communication between parts of a government.
Unfortunately, there are those who see it as more than that, as being a place to centralise an awful lot of non-governmental power, most of it financial, and wielded in a manner which actively harms people who actually work for a living.
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