The average life expectancy for a Russian soldier in Ukraine is between 20-30 minutes, CIA director John Ratcliffe said. Speaking at a defense summit in Pennsylvania, he attributed the deadly conditions for Vladimir Putin’s forces to Ukraine’s combat drones equipped with AI. “What I would say is, our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said. “So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit, right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.” “And that’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines. And it’s why we’re now four and a half years into that conflict,” Ratcliffe added. Ukraine said this month that Russia has lost about 1.4 million soldiers since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, with over 1,000 of the Kremlin’s troops killed or wounded almost every day. In May, Ukraine’s defense ministry said it was killing roughly 200 Russian soldiers for every kilometer of territory that Moscow claimed.
Can you explain the math?
If you have 10,000 soldiers and on average the life expectancy is of 30 minutes then in 30 minutes you will have no soldiers because they all died. This is of course not the case, but works out if you average it out over a longer period.
This means Russia has to send 10,000 new troops every 30 minutes. That is 48 full replacements of their standing army every day.
48 x 10,000 = 480,000
480,000 x 30 x 6 = 86 millions
Sorry I had made some mistake in the previous calculation, still a huge number though.
Where do you get the 10000 troop number per 30 minutes? Seems absurdly high. I’d personally put it somewhere between 10-25
If they have 10,000 soldiers on the battlefield and the average life expectancy of a soldier is 30 minutes then on average they will lose 10,000 soldiers every 30 minutes.
If the life expectancy of a soldier is 30 minutes then I’d expect that on average their whole standing army will be dead in 30 minutes.
It is an absurdly high number, just like it is absurd to say that average life expectancy on the front is 30 minutes.