The long cleanup after fibre-optic drone warfare

How quickly will fibre-optic drone cables break down, and what happens to the long strands left across the Russo-Ukrainian front?

Plastic fibre-optic strands will degrade slowly and leave a difficult clearance problem, especially where a static front has accumulated long cable runs.

Fibre-optic drones can leave plastic cable across many kilometres of positions and routes. The strands will eventually deteriorate, but both decay and physical cleanup will take a long time. A relatively static front makes matters worse because repeated operations concentrate debris on the same contested ground. The technology will therefore leave a difficult postwar landscape problem after its military use ends.