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?
Musk replied directly to that post: “You are a traitor.”
Kelly fired back the next day: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”
Musk later doubled down in media appearances, stating that putting “the interests of another country above America” makes someone a traitor.
I don't see Musk making those statement about US helping the interest of other countries.
It seems like stopping Russia from being an aggressor is in the direct interest of the US. Why would Musk think otherwise?
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.
For the military that won’t change until there’s an existential threat.
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...
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.
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.
These should be export controlled and geo-locked as they are arguably much more powerful than any missile.
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.
I had the RV plan when they said it would not work in motion, but it worked pretty well on the highway anyway.
The DoD has always been deeply involved in running Starlink there
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.
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...
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?
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
That was a deliberate tactic; Government is not leaving the fate of nations in the hands of Elon Musk alone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> In this piece, two researchers from PLA-affiliated National University of Defense Technology argue that
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.
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.
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.
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...
This apparently has more footage from 2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/UADroneArchive/comments/11nxhh4/ua_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.