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.
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.
And a pretty high percentage will turn to organised crime, an astounding number of American biker gangs were created by veterans after Vietnam.
Although you could argue the types of veterans seeking adrenaline, probably won’t be the drone operators and drone builders - But if they take that route, holy mackarel the turf wars will turn grim
It’s not just biker gangs and wasn’t just Vietnam.
WW2 vets started a lot of street gangs that evolved into Crips and Bloods.
It’s nothing about adrenaline.
It’s a 1-2 punch of soldiers returning to a shitty place, and them having the social conditioning against violence broken. When a veteran is backed in a corner, waaaaaay deep in the base of the spinal cord, something that communicates with the body thousands of times faster than a consciousness can even form a thought says “you know what you can do to get out the corner”.
What makes it so prevalent, is that is rational reaction to reality.
I’ve always thought most people’s issue with PTSD, is they can’t fight the problem that’s fucking us all over. That ball of stress just builds until it bubbles over on whatever idiot was unfortunate to be in front of them at the moment. If we had a better society, vets (and others) wouldn’t be constantly repressing their urge to fix shit.
Like, less a mental health epidemic, and more a societal problem that some people can’t handle the cognitive dissonance of. The problem isnt normal people going crazy, it’s normal people not being able to handle a crazy reality.
Vets are just a demographic likely to have directly experienced violence, or at least grown accumulated to the idea that when push comes to shove, violence is the only answer. There are scenarios where force is the only option, and sometimes it’s worth it.
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.
That’s a feature. The same happened after the Iraq war, with soldiers from both sides. The regime change in Syria can be traced back to Iraq.
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.
You’re right about getting ahead of the problem. But as a side note a robot’s ability isn’t tied to the amount of times it has done the thing.
Chat control. They are way ahead. The Ukraine war also makes the outlawing impossible. It’s essentially over before people know that it had begun.
Yep.
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.
Which conflict? Search shows ww2 content.
Necessity breeds innovation
Greed breeds obsolescence
Restrictions make you creative, money makes you stupid.