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.
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.
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.
We need to outlaw the bots and fix wealth inequality while we still have the numbers.
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.
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.
guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific
Which conflict? Search shows ww2 content.
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!
Yes, that’s why they’re investing so much into AI. They can’t wait to get rid of us.
I don’t think anyone would make it out of that alive.
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.The same edge cases that leads to deleting drives
That won’t limit the usage. It just means that there is additional risk for the gene
tral population.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
You’re confusing communication with what EMP is really good at - frying digital circuits
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
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.
So… they must be spawning in the grey zone… or are they being catapulted from rostov on don?
We love to see it.
What’s the average life expectancy for a US politician in a Ukrainian weapons factory?
Not an average if it is a range.
What’s the average for Ukrainians?
And yet, they advance regardless.
Not regardless. Their advances have halved compared to last year while their casualties are up by about 75%
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.
The Crimean peninsula is practically under siege now. How long can the occupiers be a threat without fuel, ammo and supplies?
And power and water…
Phyrrically
It all depends on what terms the war ends.
Russia has never been more ripe for annexation by the USA. Unfortunately, republicans and conservative dems are literal dogs for putin.
This would end most of the election tampering happening in the world. Stop the meddling with subsea lines near russia. As well as end some proxy wars.
Attempting to annex Russia would end more than just election interference.
