The most important detail in the Financial Times’ investigation of Ukraine’s front lines isn’t the kill zone, the fiber-optic drones, or the soldiers trapped for 165 days without rotation. It’s the fishing nets.
French and Swedish fishing nets, suspended over roads, hospitals, and critical infrastructure in Kherson, are intercepting 95% of incoming Russian drones. Up from 80% last May. Not with radar-guided missiles, not with electronic warfare, not with AI-powered counter-drone systems. Nets. The oldest barrier technology in human history is defeating precision-guided munitions at a cost ratio that inverts everything the defense industry has been selling for decades.
Simple Economics as Strategy
An FPV drone costs a few hundred dollars. A fiber-optic variant under $1000. Russia produces them by the million. And soon they’ll be 3D printed by field teams themselves. The standard counter-drone response of jamming, directed energy, and kinetic intercept costs orders of magnitude more per engagement than the drone itself. That’s an attacker’s economy. The defender bleeds money and time faster than the attacker spends it.
Fishing nets flip the ratio back. The cost per meter of industrial netting is trivial. Once installed, it works continuously with zero per-engagement cost. No operator, no ammunition, no power supply. A drone hits the net, tangles, detonates harmlessly or falls. The net gets repaired or replaced for almost nothing. The attacker has to keep spending thousands per attempt against a barrier that costs pennies per interception.
That’s an economic advantage that’s sustainable.
Who Built It First
Kherson has been the laboratory. The city’s population dropped from 250,000 to 60,000 under relentless Russian drone strikes, with over 9,500 attacks on civilians by December 2024. Governor Prokudin responded with what he calls a “drone dome”: layered netting over critical routes and buildings, combined with EW systems, sensors, and civilians trained with shotguns. In some districts the sky is barely visible through the mesh.
The FT describes the same approach spreading across the front. Thousands of kilometers of nets now form tunnels over main highways, stopping suicide FPV drones from diving at vehicles. The Pentagon recently issued guidance recommending nets, barriers, and camouflage as low-cost physical defenses against small drones. Taiwan is building its T-Dome program directly from Kherson’s experience.
Nets Answer the Drone Zone Question
Last November I wrote about Ukraine’s quartermaster problem in Pokrovsk — the 20km death zone where centralized linear logistics had become suicidal under persistent drone interdiction. The FT’s kill zone report confirms that condition now covers the entire front. Two soldiers held position near Orikhiv for 165 days, thirty relief attempts failed, fog saved them. Supplies move by cargo drone and UGV. Troops crawl under thermal cloaks for days.
I compared the problem to Grant’s quartermaster insight: you don’t counter interdiction with better tactics, you build a supply architecture more resilient than the enemy’s ability to disrupt it. Multiple independent routes, pre-positioned caches, expendable logistics with losses built into planning ratios.
Nets are one such logistics architecture. Cover the supply routes with physical barriers, and the kill zone starts to shrink. Vehicles can move under netting. Positions can be resupplied. The 30 failed relief attempts become possible when the approach route is physically shielded. The engineering problem I described, to sustain forces inside a drone-saturated environment, has an inexpensive answer.
Machine Guns and Barbed Wire
The defense establishment keeps comparing drones to the tank of 1916 as if a new offensive capability awaiting doctrinal innovation. That’s backwards. Drones are the machine gun. They destroyed the old paradigm of conventional movement.
The kill zone is no man’s land. And nets are barbed wire’s inversion.
In WWI, barbed wire made from surplus telegraph supplies was cheap passive defense that made the kill zone lethal for attackers. Nets are cheap passive defense that makes the kill zone survivable for defenders. Same principle. Physical barriers that cost almost nothing defeat expensive offensive systems, by working in the opposite direction. Wire aided the machine guns. Nets defeat the drones.
The 40km fiber-optic cables, the dynamic mining, the electronic warfare stalemate — all of that is real and accelerating. But the counter already exists. It’s sitting in declining or dormant fishing ports. Defense spending could revive coastal economies instead of enriching bumbling contractors.
The question is whether militaries will scale it as infrastructure or keep chasing expensive technological and ideological unicorns while soldiers crawl through the mud under thermal blankets.
General Grant would have ordered net production over six months ago.
