[awesome_dude]

Is it *vital*

No.

It's really helpful, but it's not vital.

WRT Ukraine - the drones are now (AIUI) flown with a tethered fibre connection (inside the Ukraine) - because jammers have made radio traffic with drones near impossible for operators

[nradov]

Nope. The fiber optic drones are relatively short range, maybe up to 20km. And they can only work over land, not significant bodies of water. Ukraine is still using Starlink heavily for controlling longer range and naval drones. Starlink uses an ingenious phased array antenna system which makes it highly resistant to jamming. Recently Russia has been trying to overload Starlink satellite transceivers with powerful directional jamming but the huge size of the constellation limits how many birds they can effectively target.