[Commentary prompted by: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/10/russia-fibre-optic-drone-ukraine-war/]
Fiber optic controlled drones began appearing mid-2024 at the latest, and are gradually becoming more widespread, with the Ukrainians beginning to adopt them as well. They signal a few trends of interest:
1) EW as a primary domain of warfare, driving weapon design decisions.
2) Drones+EW as a particularly innovative field, absorbing the leading edge of marginal investment of engineering effort because it can effectively deploy that investment; this is another example of _agility_ (low time-to-reorientation, in the OODA sense) as the speciating advantage of modern drone forces, that will ultimately lead to the evolution of swarm formations [0].
3) That the Russians adopted FO drones earlier than the Ukrainians, despite being comparable/stronger in the EW space, indicates a) a drive to innovate b) the resources to do so (large spools of comparatively difficult to produce FO cable), both incongruous with most Western assessments/propaganda of their capabilities.
This last then imparts a meta-effect: given the goal of determining to what extent the Russo-Ukrainian War contains transferable lessons for future war more generally, if an accurate assessment of the Russians acknowledges their legitimate innovativeness in an important emerging field of military technology, then the progress of the war thus far rates closer to representative of future warfighting, rather than contingent to local circumstances.
[0] As was previously seen with the transition from infantry-attached armor to armor formations proper.
Cross-post: https://x.com/jpt401/status/1878118477640147205
