PROFILES: Starshield | The non-state sovereigns

On October 14, Ukrainian soldiers using drones to attack Russian forces in Zaporizhzhia and elsewhere started to find many of their machines were losing satellite connectivity. Given Ukraine’s extensive and largely successful use of drones in the war, the anomaly was noticeable, forcing operators to abandon missions.

Experts later traced the problem to a satellite communications service provided by U.S.-based SpaceX, called Starshield. A week later, The Wall Street Journal reported the disruption had been deliberate: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had personally asked for the connectivity to be throttled. Where the order first originated has been disputed, in Mr. Musk’s office or in the White House. But wherever it did, the fact remains: Mr. Musk was able to take para-state action in a war between two sovereign countries. (On October 22, U.S. President Donald Trump said he had asked Mr. Musk to restore connectivity.)

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation currently consists of more than 11,000 satellites in low-earth orbit that provide Internet connectivity to users on the ground. Starshield uses the same constellation to provide secure communications important to national security, with stronger data encryption; its other services, including remote-sensing, use specialised satellites. Ukraine uses Starshield because Russia’s invasion in early 2022 has damaged the eastern European nation’s telecom infrastructure.

By December 2024, the Pentagon had also arranged for Ukraine to access Starshield through roughly 3,000 terminals. Today, its forces use the service to track enemy positions and supply routes and to intercept drones, with the Starlink satellites relaying information.

Mr. Trump has been insisting Ukraine stop attacking Russia’s oil refineries over his worries about surging international oil prices, primed by his war in West Asia. When Mr. Trump objected once more on October 10, Mr. Musk chipped in that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had gone too far. Four days later, Ukrainian soldiers felt the pinch.

Parastate powers

For decades now, private contractors have supplied armies with arms, intelligence, and logistical support. However, the armies had physical ownership of and control over many of the weapons they purchased. With Starshield, however, the provider continued to retain the ability to change the operating conditions of the ‘assistance’ even after the customer had begun using it — like a grenade launcher that could launch grenades to 150 m on most days but suddenly launched only to five metres on one, because you were not fighting your war the way the manufacturer preferred.

The existence of such an entity is the basis of Mr. Musk’s parastate power. Ordinarily, the decision to stop or withhold a country’s military operations would involve political leaders and defence officials. Now, however, Starshield has well and truly complicated the relationship between public authority and private ownership. Perhaps it was a matter of time.

In 2022, Mr. Musk refused Ukraine’s request to activate Starlink connectivity near Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea, which Russia has annexed, to enable Ukrainian forces to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Mr. Musk later expressed some consternation about the conflict escalating — a compunction he seems to have lost since, even as his own relationship with Mr. Trump has soared and plummeted. Nonetheless, the fact that the concerns of a single non-state actor could matter at all — an absurd notion in an earlier era — has become a strategic reality. Subsequent Pentagon contracts have sought, at least in part, to formalise the relationship between Starlink and the U.S. military.

Today’s armies, and their wars, increasingly depend on satellite communications, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, all of which private contractors can develop and package at speed and deploy at scale. Musk’s actions with Starshield last week have revealed that military action had until recently depended, perhaps passively, on the lack of such speed and scale as one kind of safeguard. Now that their importance is shrinking, armies of the present and future must deliberate on what can replace them.