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 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.
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.
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.
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
We put asbestos back in the bag.
Saying that is defatism spread by useful idiots. “AI” is just software (which, hilariously, isn’t even close to AI). It’s not “here to stay”, because it’s not “here”.
We had heat-seaking, radar, face/shape-recognition with computer vision for years. Current “AI” brings nothing to the table that couldn’t be achieved earlier. Maybe a more intuitive human-computer interface, and even that is a dubious.
ML is different, and it has been “out of the bag” for a long time, but nobody batted an eye.
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.
you all agreed to not go to work tomorrow? all 1 of you? billionaires are terrorized by this thought!
i quit work at 35, I’m now, 61. My only regret looking back was not quitting earlier.
To be fair though it took a near death experience at age 34 to crystallize what was important to me.
how do you afford it?
I don’t think anyone would make it out of that alive.
Yes, that’s why they’re investing so much into AI. They can’t wait to get rid of us.
If it’s the video I’m thinking of, yeah there’s not much you could do ay.
It’s frightening all right.
machines who would follow any order incapable of disobeying
This isn’t as simple as it might seem. As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
And because of the rapid improvements in eval awareness, it’s also not so simple to screen out more subversive behaviors.
The same edge cases that leads to deleting drives and production databases with the newest transformers is going to start to occur in military applications if they scale out complex model intelligence.
As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
they could do similar to what some big companies do with meat employees: nobody is executing the malicious thing, everyone is just doing a small task that could be legit. nobody knows what is exactly happening.
the model flies the drone over there. after context reset, it calculates target for some object. after context reset, not knowing anymore what the target was, it shoots the target. after context reset it turns to “search and rescue mode”. when it found people, its context reset again, target and shoot.As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
they could do similar to what some big companies do with meat employees: nobody is executing the malicious thing, everyone is just doing a small task that could be legit. nobody knows what is exactly happening.
the model flies the drone over there. after context reset, it calculates target for some object. after context reset, not knowing anymore what the target was, it shoots the target. after context reset it turns to “search and rescue mode”. when it found people, its context reset again, target and shoot.
Can’t put the genie back in the bottle. but Ai vs Ai will be the new frontier of warfare.
They called it
At this point we still haven’t even found the bottle…
The fighting robots suck at literally everything but getting up after they fall.
Ukraine’s drones are human controlled.
We’re still decades from automated drone bot fights and they’ll only be “ready” because the first country that flips a switch won’t care how many innocent’s they kill.
to save innocent russian soldiers the tankies will surely accept that a peace deal with ukraine so that nato can take another border country with russia and never invade will be a sensible option
also they have to gtfo of georgia and anywhere else
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.
which is why Ukraine is trying to eliminate the oil funding. harder to invest when the country is bled dry financially.
Yeah a complete collapse of Russia is pretty much the only win condition for Ukraine. I don’t think a coup is possible since the Russian military knows how dangerous Ukraine has become. Hardliners on all sides. A total collapse of Russia would be very dangerous too.
It’s also possible the AI bubble will pop and the US and then global economy will collapse, and then EU backing for Ukraine could fail too. That would be the worst case scenario lol. Can you imagine how easy it would be to stoke resentment among Ukrainians against Europe for “betraying” them? And then millions more of refugees fleeing and pushing into a Europe in an economic crisis.
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
The source of this claim is a tiny anonymous telegram channel, that was then cited by NY Post, which was then presumably quoted by Ratcliffe.
It seems from HIS quote that he was referencing the CIAs own sources
“Our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said
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This is great for Ukraine, but not so hot for the future of warfare. We may have to get good at building EMPs for when the urban pacification terminators come.
yeah I can’t help but read all this as very bad news indeed in the longer term. There’s nothing stopping Russia, North Korea, or indeed any random manchild billionaire deploying this tech within the coming months or years and deciding who they think should die. It’s not like nukes which are difficult to get material for and difficult to build. Most of the advanced stuff is the software, which can be easily copied.
but not so hot for the future of warfare.
Maybe the future of warfare is to figure out a better way for people to settle their differences.
That would, of course, mean we would first have to figure out how to prevent narcissistic megalomaniacs from being in positions of power.
If drones are operated fiber optically, does an EMP even work?
EMP destroys electronics. The fibre optics, plastic and metal will all be ok. the circuit boards will all be fried. Future drones will no doubt have emp protections, but its still early days
*fiber. Not fibree or fibray.
“Fibre” in English.
“Fiber” in Americanglish
There is more than one dialect of English.
Emps are good, but they don’t care if you are friend or foe, or civilian infrastructure and it doesn’t stop when it hits its intended target. So itll probably take out the next few Km’s
So you can probably just shoot it forward on the frontlines. But thats not really how drone warfare works alot of the time
Pop goes the weasels. It’s only a matter of time before these start being used in other countries for assassinations. scary future indeed.
Street Justice for white collar criminals like Martin Skreli…
The bravery and strength and heart and resilience of the Ukrainian people is awe inspiring…
is it the reason that Ukraine get more body on exchanges?
The swap took place at the Novaya Guta border checkpoint in Gomel Oblast, with Russia handing over 501 bodies of fallen soldiers and Ukraine returning 31 bodies of Russian servicemen.
https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/17/ukraine-bodies-from-russia/
Not much left of Russian soldier bodies after they are killed by a Ukrainian drone. A few scraps, usually if they haven’t burned up in the fire started by camp stove fuel immediately after the drone explodes.
We love to see it.
So… they must be spawning in the grey zone… or are they being catapulted from rostov on don?
Are you ready yourself to join the front lines and get killed in less than 30 minutes?
If not you shouldn’t advocate for war.
Call of duty: drop and pop
Not an average if it is a range.
What’s the average life expectancy for a US politician in a Ukrainian weapons factory?
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.
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