A video making the rounds shows camouflaged soldiers in a rural field using long branches to chase small quadcopter drones and knock them out of the air. The footage has an almost medieval feel, with troops running and swinging at machines that cost a fraction of what most military hardware does. After the drone goes down, the soldiers retrieve it and inspect the wreck near a set of equipment cases. It is a blunt, hands-on way of dealing with a threat that normally gets a much more high-tech answer.

The clip shows how drone-saturated battlefields push troops to improvise when jammers, guns or missiles are not at hand. Cheap quadcopters can watch positions, spot targets and sometimes carry explosives, and defending against them with expensive systems is not always practical. Similar stick-and-net tricks have been seen in the war in Ukraine, but reports from there note that swinging at an explosive FPV drone is risky and often fails. The video does not say who the soldiers are or where it was filmed, so viewers are left asking whether this is a real battlefield tactic or a lucky moment caught on camera.