It's real long, like miles of fairly small transparent cable.

From the article :

There are examples of drone operators from earlier this year being able to trace the cables back to the positions from where they were launched and target the enemy crews. But if this technique was a successful one, fibre optic drones would have disappeared as soon as they appeared on the battlefield, when – from presidents to workshops – all the talk is of increasing numbers.

You won't be able to just follow the wire, it's millimeter thin and extremely light. And drone operators need to constantly move anyway.

This is not new tech. We have been using wires like this in the battlefield since the 70's. I was a TOW gunner and shot plenty of missiles that have a wire like this drone. Except, ya know it's a missile and it moves significantly faster. TOW stands for Tube launched Opitically Wire guided missile.

Ask away if you wanna know anything about em.

If they're up to 20 km it could take you a while and they're very small and difficult to see, possibly going through difficult terrain.

Perhaps they just pull it back real fast 😆

Not just that but the pilot can be on the other side of the world from wherever the fiber leads out.

Most likely the fiber is coming out of a bunker that just has some switches and a TACLANE or something similar. Doesn't take much infra...you need that, some sort of low-latency network connection, and room for drones to take off.

Once it's set up, the site can be unmanned. Hell they can rig it to blow itself up after the mission is complete, so that nothing can be recovered from the infra if it's found.

For that matter, most of the drones flight path could be pre- programmed...the pilot only there as a contingency. Doing that, one operator could control several drones simultaneously.

Drone manufacturer: "We're having trouble with our drones getting jammed, any ideas?"

Intern: "I always use CAT6 for my pc"

Drone manufacturer: "You goddamn genius!"

It's neither, they're spare wire reels for older tow missiles which were wired for the same reason.

On the scale of human warfare, "a few months" is pretty new. Frankly, its fairly new on the timescale of the Ukraine war at this point.

What does that look like? Can't imagine what tons of fiber in the air looks like, do you have a video you can share with the rest of the class

"Carrier has arrived."

Multiphasic drones capable of passing through solid material are next!

I build some (they aren't in Ukrainian hands yet, but will be - if they want them, because they're advancing super fast and could be many steps ahead). There is no "might", they work.

10 kilometers of fiber weighs 1.5 kg, less if you buy fancier kinds of fiber. A drone with 10-inch props lifts this without problems. You can bend the fiber around a pencil and only experience degraded signal. Only a 90-degree bend will make it snap. In the war zone, landscapes after some battles already resemble "attack of the spiders" movies.

In peace time, the challenge is finding a farmer who allows using their field to test this. Promising to reel everything in and pay for damaged crops goes a long way, though. But sea is an even better idea - easier to reel it back.

P.S.

I am quite grateful to an Ukrainian radio amateur, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov. He published info about the early Russian models that were found crashed, and made a big deal about it, as one should. People listened to him and took him seriously, and started developing them ASAP.

Like torpedos used to do.

The fiber we use at our datacenter is quite flexible but still gets damaged if you bend it too far. To roll it like they describe you would still want to have a fairly large drum (probably like 3-4 inches in diameter) which would make it pretty bulky for a small drone.

Because the secret is where it is, not that it exists.