The recent row over SpaceX’s Starlink and its role in helping Ukraine defend itself from a rapacious Russian invasion seems to grow only more urgent, especially as the Russian government has stepped up attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, targeting electricity, water, and communications. Starlink, an internet service powered by a vast “satellite constellation,” is an essential backstop against that destruction. At the outset of the Russian invasion, SpaceX sent thousands of its terminals to Ukraine to facilitate communication among the Armed Forces of Ukraine and help civilians communicate with the outside world, though it would be a stretch to claim the terminals were donated, as The Washington Post quickly discovered.
Since then, Starlink has also become an essential tool for the Ukrainian military to coordinate across thousands of kilometers of combat theater. Michael Kofman, a defense analyst at CNA Corporation and an expert on the Russian military who’s not given to sweeping pronouncements or hyperbole, admitted in a recent interview: “Early on in the war I was a bit dismissive of its efficacy but I think it’s grown considerably over time, and I think it’s actually had a real significant role in what it provides the Ukrainians on the battlefield.”
But now, with outages plaguing the system and SpaceX’s terminally online CEO, Elon Musk, suggesting that his support for Ukraine’s position has waned, it might be time to Elon-proof this vital tool against Twitter-driven whims—and to think seriously about bringing more of the defense and space industries back into the direct purview of government. Such vital infrastructure needs to be nationalized rather than used as a PR football for attention-hungry CEOs.
Ukraine should not be dependent on a system so subject to one man’s infamously mercurial whims. The role of tech companies—already infamously unaccountable—in such vital causes is far too great here, and the world does not need any more tech barons falling in love with their “one weird trick” to end global crises. Though public-private partnerships are much mythologized, the time has come for considering the re-nationalization of vital infrastructure, if only to shield them from the kind of silliness that catches CEOs’ fancies on Twitter.
Understanding what’s happened over the past few weeks requires a bit of a detailed timeline—though it’s worth noting that the dates on which events were reported are not necessarily when they happened.
The trouble burst out into public view on October 3 when Musk tweeted out a widely-mocked “peace plan” for Ukraine that would’ve required it to surrender most of the territory Russia has annexed over the course of the war, as well as Crimea, which was illegally annexed in 2014. He doubled down on the plan over the coming days. Needless to say, Ukrainians were decidedly chilly to the idea; Ukrainian diplomat Andrij Melnyk even told Musk to “fuck off.”
In an apparently unrelated event, on October 7, it was reported that Starlink terminals were experiencing outages all across the front line of the Ukrainian advance against Russian forces in the Donbas and farther south in Kherson oblast.
The plot thickened, however, on October 11, when the consultant Ian Bremmer alleged in his widely read geopolitics newsletter that Musk had tweeted this indecent proposal after a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, and that Musk had told him as much. Musk vehemently denied this and, eventually, so did the Kremlin. Then news broke that Musk’s SpaceX was saying the company could not fund the use of the Starlink terminals indefinitely or provide any more to Ukraine unless the US government took over funding for the program from SpaceX.
The timing struck many as suspicious—suspicions that Musk himself all too eagerly stoked by tweeting that he was merely taking Ambassador Melnyk’s suggestion to “fuck off.” Finally, just as reports were leaking that the Pentagon was considering using funds from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative to pay for the program, Musk again took to Twitter to say SpaceX had withdrawn its funding request. “The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free,” he tweeted.
It was notable that, amid this furor, some Ukrainians came forward to say that they had been paying for the terminals and subscription fees themselves, either on their own behalf or as charity for others—people like Dimko Zhluktenko, founder of Dzyga’s Paw, a charity that provides support for the Ukrainian armed forces. He claims that some Ukrainian soldiers have put their own money toward the equipment. Zhluktenko said that his charity alone had purchased 50 of the terminals at MSRP, as well as the $60 monthly subscription fee for some of those terminals.
It would be a fool’s errand to suggest that this saga is anywhere near over. But it has the quality of a flash of lightning on a dark night, illustrating the threadbare whims supporting vital infrastructure amid a war that could decide the fate of democracy itself. Starlink’s Ukraine funding remains murky, and as The Washington Post’s reporting suggests, it’s clear that there’s already been support from multiple governments to get the system up and running.
Musk’s politicking on Twitter is distracting in its way—his infamous “we’re just following his recommendation” tweet was spectacularly ill-advised, but also disguised the fact that the funding request had been quietly sent to the Pentagon weeks prior, before Musk’s ill-fated foray into geopolitical strategy (according to CNN, it had been sent “last month”). It also point to the fact that his enormous power is wielded with precious little regard; to even joke like that about a matter so serious—well, suffice it to say that Hillary Clinton’s famous line warning against the rule of “a man who can be baited with a tweet” applies to any position of power.
Still, the colorful personality of one Twitter addict risks obscuring a larger point: the dangerously outsize role of private operators in a space where profit must not be imperative. I’ll hardly claim to be original in suggesting that war profiteering is dangerous and perverse, but this is just the latest reminder of the fact that, in addition to being morally wrong, it can also be a strategic and tactical weakness. A service as vital as Ukraine’s satellite communication system shouldn’t be controlled by private operators who may be easily swayed by personal political considerations.
Public-private partnerships (sometimes known as P3s or PPPs) are a decidedly mixed bag at best, with numerous projects ultimately being subject to nationalization or re-nationalization (like the infamous Railtrack in the UK) due to all manner of failures or breakdowns of agreements. Some may consider Starlink’s Ukrainian operation to be something other than a PPP because it was neither designed nor documented as such, but if it walks like a duck, etc. Furthermore, the very lack of a formal public agreement is a huge part of the problem here; the amount taxpayers are already contributing is murky, and however much it is, it has not bought them or the Ukrainians peace of mind or surety in the future. The only thing worse than your average PPP is an informal one. Loath as I am to suggest anyone give SpaceX money, it would have been better if the Pentagon had bought the system outright, or if the US government had been able to leverage the Defense Production Act to commandeer it.
Musk cannot be trusted here. In March, he shared a right-wing meme that criticized the demonstrative cultural signaling among many social media activists, which mockingly said “I support the current thing.” A Ukrainian flag was front and center. It’s another cultural tidbit that reveals the impoverished worldview of the far-right, reducing people’s lives to the empty gesture of a passing fancy, deliberately confusing occasionally twee social media avatar changes with the substance of the real-world issues they refer to—yet, as with all such memes, it says more about how men like Musk see the world than anything else. What becomes of Ukraine if he stops viewing the Russo-Ukrainian war as his current thing?
The stakes are much too high to leave these things to chance, or to the lucre-sniffing incentives of capital. For example, one must note that Musk, fresh off the warm reception for his Ukraine tweets, suddenly decided to try to solve the Taiwan Strait crisis as well—and did so in a manner that won him praise from China’s central government, a government whose goodwill is quite important to the bottom line of his key businesses.
If governments continue to depend on the private sector to do more of what they used to do in-house, the world risks being despoiled by the mercenaries of startup culture—on whom people have become dangerously dependent for defense and space exploration alike, the vital intersection where Starlink sits. While contractors have been a part of, say, the space program from the very beginning—indeed the very phrase military-industrial complex, with all its ominous connotations, was coined by no less a figure than Dwight D. Eisenhower over 60 years ago—the contractors are increasingly becoming the whole enterprise, fulfilling his prescient warnings. It is fitting, in a grim way, that at this moment of mortal danger for democracy, a literal battle in its defense is imperiled by the very capitalists who have been hollowing it out for a century.
