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.
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.