Fiber-optic cable has become a staple of drone war. From Ukraine to the Sahel, combatants are fielding quadcopters piloted via kilometer-long lengths of cable that allows operators to control them across vast distances while insulating the drone from being knocked from the sky. This technique was once a cheap way for militaries to beat their opponents’ electronic warfare, but demand for cable from data centers and war is raising the cost of every flight.
War is a cat and mouse game. One side deploys a devastating tactic and the other side figures out a way to defeat it. When small and cheap quadcopter drones began to dominate the skies, first by Islamic State and then in Russia’s war on Ukraine, fighters quickly learned it was easier to knock them out of the sky with electronic warfare than it was to shoot them down.
Then, in 2023, Russia began to deploy FPV drones controlled via lengths of fiber-optic cable. The cable sits spooled in a tube below the drone that unwinds as it flies. The fiber-optic cable provides a fast and clear connection between a drone and its operator and no signal is flying through the air which makes it immune to jamming.
Ukraine took heavy vehicle losses when Moscow began using fiber-optic drones but Kyiv quickly adopted the tactic and now wheat fields in the country are covered in discarded cable. Three years ago, this was a cheap and effective means of slipping past enemy defenses. In 2026 it’s not nearly as cost effective.
“Fiber-optics is still happening at the battlefield, although not as much as it used to be. It’s extremely pricey now. We used to buy 50km spool for $300, now it’s easily $2500. Just so you know,” Dimko Zhluktenko, a Ukrainian soldier, said in a post on X on May 10.
The price of fiber-optic cable has been steadily rising since about 2023 and has almost doubled in just the past few months. In January, Shanghai based fiber-optic company Sun Telecom declared there would be a “fiber famine” in 2026. Last year, a kilometer of its G.652D fiber cable cost $2.20. By December of 2025 the same length of cable cost $3. A month later, Sun Telecom had increased the price again to $4.1.
One of the big market shifts driving up the cost of fiber is an increased demand for data centers as companies rush to build out the compute infrastructure they believe they’ll need for AI. “Almost every phone call I get from my customers is trying to see, how do we get them more? I think next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers,” Wendell Weeks, the CEO of fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning, told CNBC after his company signed a deal with Meta for $6 billion in cable.
In a January LinkedIn post, North Carolina telecom company Brightspeed warned of “fiber-supply shortages.” Two other American ISPs told trade publication Broadband Breakfast said they’d seen orders for fiber unexpectedly cancelled. “We have heard concerns in recent weeks of timeframes slipping, and concerns about the ability to obtain supplies at all, as circumstances change,” Mike Romano, the CEO of NTCA, a rural broadband tradegroup, told Broadband Breakfast.
Data center driven demand is only part of the story. Wars in Ukraine, Iran, and the Sahel region of Africa are hungry for fiber-optic cable and manufacturers can barely keep up. Combined, Russia and Ukraine consume 50-60 million kilometers of fiber-optic cable every year, according to Kyiv Post. Most of this comes from China because both countries lack the domestic manufacturing base to produce that much cable. The demand has caused the price of a kilometer of Chinese fiber-optic to go from $2.33 in 2025 to $5.83 in 2026.
The core component of fiber-optic cables is a long piece of flexible and manufactured glass or plastic called an optical fiber. The delicate strands are about the width of a human hair. Ukraine doesn’t manufacture optical fibers. Russia had one factory in the city of Saransk but Ukraine destroyed it with drones in the spring of 2025. Now both countries rely on China to keep drones in the air. Exports on fiber-optic cable to Russia spiked after Ukraine destroyed the factory, hitting a height of 717.5 million meters in November of 2025.
“Ukraine has recently expanded its use of Starlink communications for attack drones, which are impractical for Russia to jam. The cost of a Starlink antenna—which is expended in an attack—is now lower than the cost of the longest-range FPV fiber-optic spools,” Roy Gardiner, an OSINT analyst at Defense Tech for Ukraine told 404 Media. “The drive toward the development and deploying at least partial autonomous control for drones to defeat electronic warfare jamming will accelerate as fiber optic FPVs become less available.”
During war humans become great innovators. The game of cat and mouse continues and fighters are developing strategies to combat fiber-optic drones. In September of 2025, Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers began to report a new technique for countering the wire driven drones: a 150-meter-long fence made of spinning barbed wire. The theory is that the fiber-optic cable, dragged along the ground, will get caught in the fence and severed.
Despite rising costs and the dangers posed by barbed wire, the drones keep flying. In March, Iran used fiber-optic controlled drones to strike American targets in the gulf, including the destruction of a Black Hawk helicopter parked in Iraq. The known fiber-optic FPV drones top out at about 50 kilometers of cable, a distance that will clear the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest point.
