Engineering Victory

How small steps enable weaker powers to defeat stronger nations

Allan Milne Lees
13 min readSep 13, 2024
Image credit: BBC News

Imagine you’re Vladimir Putin crouching in the Kremlin back in 2004. You’ve read Alexander Dugin’s book about how Russia ought to be the greatest nation on Earth but has consistently been attacked and undermined by the West, not merely in terms of military power but also in terms of social norms. Those decadent Westerners are trying to turn good decent obedient Russian serfs into self-directing homosexual internationalists.

Clearly, something must be done.

But what?

Russia’s economy is a disaster, weakened by seventy-three years of central planning and by corruption that pervades every single aspect of life. Russia’s military is ramshackle, with plenty of equipment that is horrifically sub-standard compared to what the USA can deploy at a moment’s notice. Moreover, Russian command-and-control is antiquated and inflexible. A frontal assault on the hated West would result in the rapid and total destruction of Russia, which is unacceptable. At first glance it seems as if Russia’s best days (which were pretty awful at best and horrific at worst) are behind it. Baby Bush is in the US White House and along with eminence gris Cheney this is the conclusion the Americans have also reached and so they’re entirely focused on pointless wars…

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.