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.