Low-cost, hard to track, harder to stop and capable of overwhelming in swarms, the fibre-optic-guided drones are proving to be a disruptive force in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and parts of the West Asia war.

According to Rahul Bedi, a Delhi-based journalist reporting on military and security matters, fibre-optic drones represent an inflection point in modern warfare — cheap expendable systems that are no longer constrained by electronic jamming or battlefield visibility. “In Ukraine and in southern Lebanon, they have redefined the front line, enabling persistent low-altitude strikes in heavily contested zones. The result is a battlefield where control is increasingly determined not by scale or sophistication of conventional weapon systems alone, but by adapting these phantom-like drones to dominate the environment.”

Hezbollah has launched a new weapon against northern Israel in the latest round of fighting: small drones controlled with fibre-optic cables the width of dental floss that avoid electronic detection.

These drones — used widely in the war in Ukraine — are small, hard to track and potentially lethal.

Many drones are susceptible to electronic jamming by air defences. Jamming can cause a drone to crash or return to its point of origin.