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.
We love to see it.
This is good news for Ukraine
This is godawful news for humanity. I fucking guarantee you that drones like these will later be used against citizens and innocent people
War often accelerates the development and adoption of technology. Russia is learning a lot too in this war and are focusing on developing and producing better killer drones as well. As much as people here want to believe so, Russians are not stupid.
Once we can fully mass produce killer drones automatically, they basically become a weapon of mass destruction. But unlike a nuke, they could depopulate a whole country without much fuss. At least theoretically. With solar panels they could even enter a kind of “lurker” mode to wait out any stragglers.
I can’t overemphasize how much I wish we didn’t have to do this. I hope the history records we aren’t making murder drones for shits and giggles, but rather because it’s the only way to not be overwhelmed by the meat wave.
IDF troops have been killed by FPV drones. Incredible sums of money will be spent to find countermeasures that Ukraine and Russia havent been able to make work yet. Hopefully the shield will become cheaper and more effective than the sword again.
I’m pretty surprised we haven’t seen any assassinations of public figures using quadcopters yet.
These things are almost as easy to obtain and weaponize as a rifle.
Yeah that’s the part I super hate, we’re creating hell and it’s going to come to us
Keep in mind this statement is coming from Trump’s CIA.
The 20 minute claim is definitely shady, it is explored here on More or Less from 6:32 20 mins claim
Considering Trump absolutely bums Putin does that mean the true figure of Russian casualties is higher?
I think 1.4 Megahumans matches what the Ukrainians are saying. Still, an enormous figure, considering Russia as a whole only has hundred times as many.
If this statement was true, and Russia was striving to have just 10,000 troops in the battlefield at all times. In the past 6 months Russia would have lost 126 million soldiers.
Given that the population of Russia is 140 millions and that they likely deploy more than 10,000 soldiers at a time, this statement makes no sense.
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.
There are many ways to fail in 30 seconds. Just ask your mom.
It’s not just flying drones.
I saw video of Ukraine using three tracked ground drones with machine guns in concert with multiple flying drones used to launch rockets to clear a house.
Russians were firing as they fled, but it literally doesn’t matter if you shoot a land drone, they’re mini tanks.
If/when AI is really running that shit, the oligarchs will stop pretending they think we’re the same species.
Do people realize how fucked we’d be right now if the US army was just machines who would follow any order incapable of disobeying?
Even if we had a utopian government guaranteed to always be just, someone could just hack it.
We need to make use/development of AI like this a major war crime while we still can.
If it’s the video I’m thinking of, yeah there’s not much you could do ay.
It’s frightening all right.
AI is here to stay. There is no putting that cat back in the bag
We need to stop fucking around with greedy, fascist governments
I’m guessing a new cold-war arms race is in effect. Nukes are devastating too but not used offensively except those two times.
I’m guessing we’re stockpiling drones now
Here’s another worry. Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.
Going by previous wars over many years some of them will inevitably go down the mercanary route and sell those skills to the highest bidder.
That’s why the west should step up its support to Ukraine once the war stops. All those veterans need proper care, need to be reintegrated. Need to feel seen and heard. Otherwise you’ll have a bunch of unstable personalities with a lot of knowledge on how to kill people.
The US sure as shit won’t do that. Only 18% of our veterans get the benefits they’re entitled to, and that was a pre-trump2 figure.
US developers and commercial investors (along with their European peers) are going to move on all that vacant Ukrainian real estate like Joey Chestnut on a hotdog cart. So much of what has kept Ukraine going to date has been Zelensky eating foreign debts that far exceed his country’s GDP. When the bill comes due, Ukraine’s going to be crushed harder than it was after the USSR collapsed.
The US will be more than happy to turn Ukraine into the next Israel, flooding it with western settlers and carving it up into a thousand different micro-states.
I saw another video of a robot “ultimate fighting league” recently with humanoid bots.
The two clankers went for 100% roundhouse kicks and missed almost everytime, but when they fell down?
It didn’t look real, they were back on their feet perfectly in milliseconds. It was clear the kicks was just the only scripted move, but these bots have picked themselves up off the ground probably millions of times. So that’s the only thing they currently excel at.
Eventually they’re gonna be straight up ninjas.
It’s fucking stupid to wait until we can’t beat them to try and outlaw them. We need to act now before the oligarchs literally have an army of terminators.
We need to outlaw the bots and fix wealth inequality while we still have the numbers.
Yep.
Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.
We’re already seeing this technology pop up throughout Iran, across Africa, and among both state and guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific. For all the lauding of Ukraine, the folks who are really making the most of this are Houthis and what’s left of the Wagner Group.
One of the ironies of this conflict is how many of these smaller militias are running circles around Silicon Valley tech firms - your Andurils and Mithrils and Raytheons and Northrop Grummonds. The Pentagon is spending a cool milly a unit to send up Reaper Drones that get knocked out by some particularly clever goat farmers with $200 in parts from Temu and a bootleg Starlink subscription.
Necessity breeds innovation
Greed breeds obsolescence
Restrictions make you creative, money makes you stupid.
Do they realize how fucked they would be if we all agreed to not go to work tomorrow?
Yes they do, and they also know for a fact that you will never do it.
I’m already doing it.
What’s the average life expectancy for a US politician in a Ukrainian weapons factory?
What’s the average for Ukrainians?
And yet, they advance regardless.
Oh yeah. If they keep up with the current speed, they might make it by ~2150 or so. Assuming they don’t run out of fuel in the meantime…
Once the territory is conquered, regardless of its size, it is real hard to get it back, if ever.
Not regardless. Their advances have halved compared to last year while their casualties are up by about 75%
Phyrrically
It all depends on what terms the war ends.
