Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)(interpret.csis.org) |
Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)(interpret.csis.org) |
The real strategic question isn't whether Starlink can be weaponized - of course it can - it's what happens when military operations become dependent on commercial infrastructure that a single company controls. The vendor becomes a strategic chokepoint, and there's no precedent for how that plays out in a peer conflict.
There’s obviously a few areas where this isn’t really true, like a foreign company setting up a US company to sell their product, but by and large the US is immune to the risks you describe. China similarly makes most of their own systems and is mostly immune. A large scale WW3 between the US and China cannot be stopped by a company refusing to participate.
And this isn't a new pattern by any means. Decades ago the UK military had a plan to replace their old analog centric radio gear with a system that integrated voice, data, gps blue force tracking etc. They called it BOWMAN.
The initial versions were so bad everyone started calling it Better Off With Map And Nokia.
The defense establishment moves at a glacial pace and consistently under delivers vs the equivalent commodity commercial products.
If you turn commercial infrastructure into a military tool, you put it within the firsts rows of targets' list to dismantle in case of conflict.
Given the large number of Starlink's satellites, you will inevitably have to use their own space debris to dismantle them, which will turn the LEO orbit inoperable (for centuries). With this you reduces the agility that was giving those satellites.
You would therefore be forcing the use of military satellites placed at higher orbits (lower resolution, number, more use of fuel, slower) and also forcing to use military airplanes and drones to fly over your territory (exposition).
Basically I read the article as a warning.
Is this true? I understand that they deorbit without power in up to 5 years. So their debris would decay in essentially the same time.
This describes Boeing and lots of other firms
The US has also done lots of protectionism for a bunch of monopolistic businesses out of (alleged) national security interests.
This happens: Why the world's militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517766-why-the-worlds-...
Recently this was cut off suddenly, with an immediate counter attack by Ukraine... along with Ukraine trolling the shit out of Russia frontline operatives; offering fake "recover your Starlink connection" websites and texts, scamming them out of their account credentials.
Great episode to go watch. I can't imagine how Russia thought this was a good idea?
These should be export controlled and geo-locked as they are arguably much more powerful than any missile.
As technology advances the consequences of war get worse. Asymmetrical warfare gets more effective.
We should be building and maintaining a rules-based international community predicating on peaceful resolution of disputes.
By 2100, US will look about the same as Western Europe looks today: ageing, but still OK. China will be no more.
The initial technical architecture was aligned with broad good (low res, global, daily, openly available), but the shift towards selling high res satellite capabilities directly to governments has been tough to see.
Their role of providing a public ledger is still a net good thing IMO, and i doubt Planet is adding much increased capability to the US war fighter (they have way better stuff). Harder to say for their deals with other governments that have fewer native space capabilities.
Just because I have a knife doesn't mean it affects the stability of my neighborhood. Even if I use my knife to kill a killer, that doesn't necessarily affect the stability of my neighborhood. It could even improve it.
All in all, I would rather live in a somewhat free America than in communist China.
The last 15 years has significantly changed peoples' opinions on that matter. https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Let's see how the next 15 goes.
I’m gonna need to see some immigration statistics on influx of foreigners into the PRC to believe that claim.
There are way too many sattelites, starlink militarizing means it's a viable target now for enemy nations, any one of them taking out a couple sats and causing debris would cause a chain reaction that would effectively turn space into a dump, let's not even mention that military = more money = more sats, making it even riskier.
Or the fact that at any moment those sats could also die from a carrington+ level event.
You may not realize how big space is relative to the size of a few sats.
You may want to read an actual study about it. And this doesn't even consider the possibility that militarization of starlink satellites may cause them to get taken out, which will trigger the KS the same way.
The relative impact of Kessler syndrome is honestly overblown: we're simply not that dependent on satellites for day to day activities. It would be an economic disaster, but those aren't civilization ending.
They also jacked up the subscription price which caused thousands of actual pilots to cancel their service. So expect a flood of used Starlink Minis to enter the market soon.
The DoD has always been deeply involved in running Starlink there
That was a deliberate tactic; Government is not leaving the fate of nations in the hands of Elon Musk alone.
Another not great data point is https://militarnyi.com/en/news/ukraine-starlink-data-traffic...
"Starlink satellite traffic in Ukraine fell by about 75% after SpaceX shut down its terminals in the occupied territories of the country."
By now it came to light russians for example had starlinks on every assaulting tank in addition to long range drones.
The only reason Ukraine complained was their special ops were running drone boats deep in Russian territory. After they asked for permission (following this controversy) SpaceX did a deal with DoD to let them manage those special cases allowing its use behind enemy lines.
Starlink has been nothing but positive for Ukraine
And to that end, we can clearly see that the PLA sees Space Dominance as being strategically destabilizing. They see threats to their ability to disperse and hide their nuclear launch systems.
In fact, from a 2026 lens, the best way to read this paper would be "the PLA has mapped out its vulnerabilities, and all of its risk control and escalation options (basically its suggestions in the conclusions) are basically off the table. Therefore, it's very obvious that the PLA will attempt to compensate through simultaneously achieving its own space based capability similar to Starlink, develop additional ways to hold US strategic assets (read nuclear strike platforms) at risk, and find asymmetric means of deterrence".
EDIT: Just made a connection in my head - there's been a lot of news about Chinese nuclear arsenal increases in recent years, with a uptick starting around 2023, and the DoD estimating a rough tripling from 2025-2035. I suspect these developments might be connected.
EDIT2: I think to summarize what I think would be important take away from reading this paper is that while the most immediate examples of militarized Starlink use are all very tactical level (thinking about drones in Ukraine), this piece clearly signals that the PLA also believes that Starlink militarization poses treats at the strategic (read nuclear) level. And therefore, if we think purely in terms of tactical/operational capabilities, we may be caught off guard by certain reactions by the PLA/China.
Sorry, may I get more information on why this is considered Chinese army propaganda?
My understanding is that CSIS (https://www.csis.org/about) is an US based organisation that provides analysis on topics which include Chinese organisations/military.
> In this piece, two researchers from PLA-affiliated National University of Defense Technology argue that
Americans are so propagandized and paranoid that they see a DC blob foreign policy think tank translating Chinese PLA source documents and start wondering if there's a nefarious plot afoot. "Understanding the enemy?! That sounds like an axis of evil conspiracy!"
Trouble is it's hard to tell the difference.
Exactly as cyberpunk books predicted, the technology is so advanced that all you need to create a weapon is sold in a toy store.
https://www.twz.com/37398/deadly-taliban-attack-on-governors...
Never mind airplanes, telephones, steel, cars, trucks, photography, steam engines, gasoline engines, light bulbs, electric power generation, ...
There is no good reason TSLA should be valued any more than 10% of its current valuation, and even that would be rich. There is a fine argument it should be worth 3-4% of what it currently is.
It is almost like there's a connection between PayPal, Elon Musks fortunes, and crypto.
I still wonder who Satoshi really was. I wonder how Microstrategy remains solvent.
It would be a cluster of successive collisions in a short period of time. With each collision, each destroyed satellite would produce hundreds of thousands of microfragments at increased speeds, with would make them reach different orbits.
The microfragments at lower heights of LEO would decrease their speed due the atmosphere within months to a few years, and the ones at higher heights of LEO from decades to centuries, but this ones, at time they loses such speed they would decrease the height of their orbits and sweep across their new orbiting area (like a net/mesh), their kinetic energy would keep being able to destroy or damage what they cross.
If it were done it would be like a planned Kessler Syndrome event, and LEO is currently saturated with satellites.
I had the RV plan when they said it would not work in motion, but it worked pretty well on the highway anyway.
The chatbot couldn't get past the fact that the video said it was non-partisan and if they said it it must be true.
This apparently has more footage from 2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/UADroneArchive/comments/11nxhh4/ua_...
For the military that won’t change until there’s an existential threat.
By now you pretty much know how it can break and what are the most common issues with hardware. No one invented a new type of EMP for example that can pass through the holes in a Faraday cage for example. The water in the ocean did not became ten times more acidic that hardware requires more protection.
A wild guess: you can strap an iPhone to a military grade radio kit to help with jamming and what not, and have a very usable product. Or whatever modern phone. You then swap them out easily and you are always up to date on capabilities. Cell towers are upgraded less frequently than phone hardware. Same thing with the military stuff.
I think a great part in this plays industry inertia and vendor and too much money that could be lost. “This is how things are done” and it costs $10,000 per screw because “it is certified”.
The recent war showed that you can use commercial drones with a grenade or two strapped to them in very effective ways. Not to mention the more “advanced” ones that you still go to the store and buy them.
We need more defense startups and a lot less red tape to iterate as fast as possible.
Until Starlink, you had hundreds of milliseconds of latency for satellite internet. Now it feels a lot more like you are on mobile data on a phone.
Incumbments had no reason to offer a better experience because there was no competition. Now they’ve been left in the dust because of Starlink.
The existential threat will be very instant when an enemy with no milspec equipment punches you hard in the face. And catching up will not be easy nor fast.
And while geofencing + allow-listing for sure provide value in e.g the Ukrainian conflict, it's a weak protection compared to goods that are actually under strict export control (e.g ITAR), and will always have to be done after the fact. Russia could for example put Starlink on drones launched from the Baltic Ocean targeting Poland or whatever.
They could be importing young people from nearby India, yet they're not. Why?
It seems obvious to me that people of conscience and standing have built plenty of the most cutting edge tech of this age. Yet those people are structurally embedded within business and government. Far-reaching technology is one thing, but satellite networks are especially impactful in many ways for both real time intelligence gathering and also building a record of analytic data over time.
So, PlanetLabs.. without a doubt, completely sincere in Doves reading save-the-whales data over the entire Earth. And also, connected "at the hip" to the US Federal Government. Does the US Federal Government work diligently to save-the-whales? You be the judge.
PlanetLabs is business, with investors. That is the horse that brought the endeavor to its current state. Larry Ellison seems to run a very stable business, in the same locales, and that seems to be just fine with investors. Is there any way that PlanetLabs would not be subject to the same investor pressures and direction, lawsuits and governance letters, that Oracle is subject to? seems likely that lots of the same actors are close at hand, from the beginning.
SO there is tragedy and comedy, stock price and hiring practices, technical capacity and brilliance. The mission is the message ? feedback here seems likely to escalate, so let's set a tone of informed debate, and recall that after the typing, almost nothing will actually change in practice.. just an educated guess.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-mammal-protec...
The current administration is openly extractive without the fig leaves of old.
I don’t think we can look forward to nature - whether it’s national parks or marine parks or just being a non polluting neighbor - getting any priority or protection from now onwards.
It's fair to decide that that is not major factor, but it should be an informed decision. It requires looking at the nuclear risk issues that the piece raises, and finding reasons to dismiss them.
What might be destabilizing would be long-range hypersonic missiles that fly relatively low (30 km above the surface, not 1000 km), so they can't be easily detected until it's pretty late, and can arrive from multiple directions. This is exactly the kind of weapon that is China apparently developing, BTW.
Chinese and Russian developments (HGVs, FOBs, the Russian "superweapons" like Poseidon) are all destabilizing to an extent. But as long as none them challenge/hold at risk the US second strike capability (a robust C2 network and the SSBN fleet), they won't be massively destabilizing.
For what it's worth, HGVs that could strike the US from China still need to be launched off what are effectively ICBM class rockets. The launch signatures would almost certainly be detected.
And finally, let's not even get started with what Golden Dome would do to strategic stability.
There's simply no need to go pointing fingers right now. The reality is that all sides are taking various self-interested actions that in the absence of communication or coordination will lead towards less stable environments. No side has the ability to compel the others to not take these actions, and so the best we can do is try to anticipate the new operating environments and be ready for them as best we can.
However, I think this is not the case. In the end no one wants to reduce the world to ashes over losing power. But... well, I suppose there are people crazy enough to want that.
This is explicitly one reason the US marketed the F-35 so hard to their allies. In addition to giving their allies a good capability, it made their air force dependent on continuing US support, so politicians wishing to go against US positions have to be willing to sacrifice their military power to do so. This gives the US a strong lever in negotiating.
The reality is that all US allies except for maybe France no longer have the capability to project power much outside their own territory without active US support. It's not only satellites. They're also missing just about everything else such as logistics, specialized aircraft, air defense, amphibious capabilities, intelligence, etc. With largely stagnant economies there's no way they can sustain the funding necessary to close those gaps unless they join together in closer alliances with each other.
These “military starlinks” will be much smaller systems than actual Starlink. The German one plans for 100 satellites.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/airbus-te...
The West is destroying third world countries to take their human resources. Blowing up the middle east created more uber eats drivers than defunding all the schools in Detroit ever did.
I don’t care what tesla’s quarterly sales are, I’m supporting elon’s vision.
There are no other companies in the same position as Tesla, time will tell if it succeeds or not.
Again, I’m going to qualify this with the disclaimer that this is my own baseless conspiracy theory presented purely for its entertainment value. I suspect that the United States has many effectively state owned enterprises just like the PRC, but there are elaborate obfuscation techniques used to make that seem as if that were not the case. In part that is because a large criminal network is wearing the dead US government like a skin suit.
As long as you read with the article's authorship in mind, it's useful to learn what thoughts your adversary wishes to influence and why.
This will prevent Russians importing Starlink terminals and then deploying them in Ukraine.
Work with Ukrainians to whitelist all their terminals.
https://unn.ua/en/news/ukraine-launches-starlink-whitelist-i...
This makes it a very, very dirty terminal.
This would deny all Russians the use of Starlink.
SpaceX is a privately-owned defense services company. Their #1 client is the United States. Their launches out of Vandenberg occur because the United States Space Force allows them to happen.
Are you on their board? Who are you to make the call that the product they are offering is a "civilian" (only?) service?
