A sobering milestone in Ukraine
One of the biggest shifts in combat in Ukraine for the past 18 months has been tethered fiber-optic-equipped FPV drones. The cable supplies continuous power from the ground, allowing the drone can fly for hours or even days (some spools carry as much as 50km of cable); allows the transfer of real-time high-speed data, such as live video feeds via fiber optics, and, most importantly, is far more jam-resistant than previous generations of radio-controlled UAVs.
Priced as low as $1,200 and used by both sides, with upwards of 10,000 drones lost each month across the battlefront, this has left the countryside bathed in discarded fiber optic cable.
The unnatural spiderwebs of the modern battlefield.
Even the birds are using it
Ukraine now claims that they have dispatched 1 million enemy troops by their own records, a figure that can be taken with a pallet of salt.
Still, even if overestimated by 300 percent, that is a lot of empty chairs at tables in Russia.
And it is estimated that drones accounted for 70 percent of those.