> Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of dictatorial regimes

Not only that: if simple sabotage increases paranoia, then that paranoia can harm the enemy's war effort more than the sabotage.

Trust is the most effective attack surface.

It sort of reminds me of Schindler's List where the war materials they cranked out were mindfully out-of-spec, yet plausibly just bad quality.

This was exactly my same thought.

One could argue that a lot of the so-called "research" that is conducted at government subsidized laboratories in the United States like MIT Lincoln Laboratory provides a more modern example of this same form of "passive aggressive" workplace resistance.

For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.

He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.

Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...

I just wonder if the reverse is true. That is if you are not capable of spotting extreme incompetence or institutional dysfunction, the only way to build up an organization is to make it a dictatorship. Paranoia being the sole method of troubleshooting that new regime.

Makes sense. If you feel you can't trust the people under you because you can't identify the problem people fast enough, then your best choice is to micromanage instead.

"Feel" is the key word here; this line of thinking can be less about the reality, and more about manager's own insecurities. This makes paranoia an even more powerful force amplifier for sabotage. If a tiny act of sabotage makes managers paranoid enough that they resort to corporate dictatorship, the productivity will tank. Which will probably not help with lowering the paranoia. At extreme ends, I imagine paranoid people get routinely triggered by normal variance in systems they oversee, making the whole thing self-perpetuating.

Institutional dysfunction is often a side effect of dictatorial regimes, which can develop paranoia about sabotage as a defense mechanism against actually realizing this.