When you compare the speed and effectiveness of Russia's military renewal (including planes like the Su-35) with the chain of fiascos in the US defense sector, one really wonders whether the Soviet Union's KGB campaign was a success. The KGB wanted to place deep cover agents within the US establishment (political and defense) in order to subvert the USA and damage its ability to threaten the Soviet Union. Normal KGB practice for this was to set up agents, but then let them run free with no control from Moscow or any requirement to send info back to Moscow. This made them virtually undetectable and when the Russian Federation disbanded the KGB, those deep cover agents continued to function. Soviet defectors in the 70's and 80's warned about the KGB campaign but nobody seemed to listen.
So when we see so-called "bad decisions" resulting in useless aircraft, useless stealth ships, and a whole chain of military equipment fiascos (up to and including $10,000 hammers) you really have to wonder whether the KGB won the cold war after all. We now know that the USA ran a decades long campaign to subvert the Soviet Union by sowing corruption deep within the Soviet system. How could the KGB not have done the same? Also, the Soviet Union disbanded itself quite abruptly and unexpectedly. Students of the KYB and of Russian strategy seriously wonder whether this was done to prevent the ultimate endgame in the US plan which would see Russia balkanized into a dozen small squabbling countries. Watch the film "The Turkish Gambit" to get an idea of the kind of chess games that Russians are capable of playing.
The reality of Russian intelligence activities is not a few ultra-capable super spies subverting entire procurement programs. The reality is a flood of individual little social media messages intended to feed a narrative of how strong, better, superior, unstoppable and righteous the nation of Russia is. You know, sort of like your comments in this thread.
The idea that Russia's military is "renewed" is laughable. 30 years ago they were a global superpower. Today they can't field one aircraft carrier without needing a tow. Russia is a regional power with a nuclear deterrent. And despite the rhetoric, Russia only wants to be a regional power. Their military is calibrated for that. To the extent that Russia messes with the U.S., it is only to keep the U.S. from interfering in what Russia considers to be its sphere of influence. Russia does not have the capability or interest in direct military confrontation with the U.S.
It's an interesting idea, but I think most of us here have worked for companies where we've seen this stupidity first hand. The clueless middle manager makes a bad decision, this has several knock on effects, the manager gets promoted and a lot of money has already been sunk into the bad decisions so fixing the mistakes isn't politically possible for the next guy and on it goes.
This happens every where there is humans with egos and politics in it's many forms and I doubt the KGB has infiltrated all of them.
Blaming other countries when US congressman corrupted seems to be typical response. Dont take me wrong, your claims of few agents gambling the entire US nation looks laughable to me while more number of US spies are working all over the world
The Russian military is in worse shape today than it was five years ago. Between the embargo over Ukraine and the drop in the price of oil they're broke again.
Russian military aircraft might look effective on paper but in real world operations they have mostly failed. Look what happened when they tried to deploy carrier aircraft to Syria recently.
From another hand they had only one crashed land based aircraft after 2 years of very intensive bombing in Syria, which in my understanding is a very good result.
So when we see so-called "bad decisions" resulting in useless aircraft, useless stealth ships, and a whole chain of military equipment fiascos (up to and including $10,000 hammers) you really have to wonder whether the KGB won the cold war after all. We now know that the USA ran a decades long campaign to subvert the Soviet Union by sowing corruption deep within the Soviet system. How could the KGB not have done the same? Also, the Soviet Union disbanded itself quite abruptly and unexpectedly. Students of the KYB and of Russian strategy seriously wonder whether this was done to prevent the ultimate endgame in the US plan which would see Russia balkanized into a dozen small squabbling countries. Watch the film "The Turkish Gambit" to get an idea of the kind of chess games that Russians are capable of playing.