The drone web: how consumer drones have covered Ukraine's battle lines with fiber optic cable

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia. But over the last year, a surprising change has emerged, via photos from the battlefront posted online. It has become clear that a huge part of the drone war, from dropping grenades on soldiers in bunkers, to dropping explosives on infrastructure or airfields, is wired. Those wires are fiber optic cable, stretching from drone operators to the drones, which spool out cable across the ground and over trees along the battlefront. These drones are often single-use rarely returning from the mission they set out on. And the spools of fiber optic cable, stretching over 30-50 kilometers, don't get cleaned up. We explore this evolution of drone use in the conflict - where it came from, and why.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. A recent episode asks, are boardrooms ready for the new geopolitical reality? Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.
0:18.4	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:27.2	Amory, I want to show you a photo.
0:29.5	Okay.
0:30.0	A photo that I have thought about and wondered about for months.
0:34.7	And even when I figured out what this photo was of, it still has kind of haunted my thoughts.
0:43.5	Cool.
0:44.6	So take a look and tell me what you see.
0:49.9	All right. I see a landscape with a very beautiful, I'm guessing, sunset in the background, an orangey, peachy, orangey sky.
1:01.7	Yeah.
1:03.9	I'm going to go to jump to the bottom where you see some dirt and some grass.
1:08.6	The middle is hard to parse, but it looks like it's either a wire that's running through the
1:18.2	grass or it's string that's kind of a cluster of gray, but made up of tiny, tiny threads
1:25.1	of something.
1:26.4	How much of it would you say there is?
1:28.1	Like, there's, like...
1:29.5	It's creating a similar visual effect to the Grand Canyon, where you're like, this is
1:36.8	either five feet or it's five bazillion feet in depth.
1:42.1	It looks vast.
1:43.9	The first thing you should know when looking at this photo is that it is a
1:48.3	photo from the front lines of the war in Ukraine. Hmm. Okay. What does the war in Ukraine mean exactly?
1:57.6	Well, people who study this war with any scrutiny or have ever experienced it
	...

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