[cjbgkagh]

Yeah, I'm serious, I'm not making a 'if you kill your enemies they win' argument but part of learning by doing is having the people who make poor decisions suffer the consequence of those decisions so that there are fewer people around making poor decisions. Especially in the military where you're spending other peoples money and other people suffer the consequences of your misadventures. Of course there is quite a lot of randomness in outcomes, but a blunder of this magnitude is inexcusable considering their line of work. Because of the corruption in the Russian army I would assume there is only a weak link between competence and rank and having an actual enemy around to punish mistakes would be helpful in winnowing out the morons. I'm pretty sure Russia knows they're corrupt and have deliberately adopted a learn by doing strategy to improve their warfighting capability for this very reason.

A big part of the process in undermining an opposition is promoting the worst aspects in them. Instead of killing off a moron, perhaps secretly encourage them to run for office and donate to their political campaigns, secretly buy media coverage for them, etc.