I watched the video of one navigating a series of nets to weave its way inside and into the open hatch of a tank. It’s ridiculously impressive.

I watched a video of one being destroyed by cutting the trailing fiber optic cable with a pair of scissors. Also impressive.

Yes, def. possible. But right now in UA's regions where drones are used the most, there are so many used fiber-optic cables laying on the fields, that you have basically zero chance to cut them all, because you would be cutting already discarded ones.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wcMZWRJL_m4

I was wondering about that. At military-industrial scale, that's a lot of fiber optic cable.

And it's glass, no? So not going to environmentally degrade over time.

Considering the fighting is mostly over agricultural fields, what are the long term consequences of years of war?

At the extreme of 10KM range we are taking about 2.4kg of glass maximum. Spread of over 10km. It is largely insignificant.

Even if you had 100 drones starting from the same exact place and going to the exact same place you would find 24g of glass per meter. A single leftover beer bottle would be at least 6 times that amount.

When you worry about stuff it is useful to do the work.

Somehow I don’t think that’s their primary concern at the moment

Granted. But it's going to be someone's concern after all this is over.

And unlike landmines, how do you detect and remove kilometers of cable?

Glass breaks down to sand so I wouldn’t worry too much about it

With physical weathering.

I was about to respond to your comment above by saying landmines are 1000x worse, but you just said the opposite, which is completely incomprehensible to me. Are you perchance thinking of literally just the environment, not the fact that countless lives will be harmed and lost for decades to come because of the indiscriminate nature of landmines?

While landmines have the obvious explosive and shrapnel first order effect of causing great harm, I'm wondering about the subtler effects of fiber optic cable pollution.

What happens when someone uses agricultural machinery on a field littered with cable, both to machinery and people? What are the consequences of consuming broken bits of cable that may mingle into produce?

And most critically, if the above are issues, how do you then remove cable from fields at scale? It would seem maddening to try to detect and gather kilometers of tangled glass.

Out of all the possible failure modes of fiber optic drones, scissors are pretty much the least likeliest issue you’ll encounter.

Provided that you catch it in time ... the window for doing that is short (several minutes) and you also likely need to expose yourself to potential other drones patroling in your proximity.

Could you use a bunch of chaff in hopes of burning the fiber optic cables?