Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)

freakynit

I mean most of us knew from day 1 this would get militarized as soon as possibly can... the same goes for spacehip (large payloads delivery to battlefields) as well and neuralink (during interrogations).

modeless

Why is Chinese army propaganda on this site? It's not news that the PLA will oppose technology that gives the US military an advantage.

anovikov

While there is a massive US advantage in space launch, it should be used to the maximum. It's not going to last forever (while perhaps, sufficiently long that China fizzles out demographically before it's gone).

siliconc0w

It's not great that they found starlink terminals on Russian drones (they've since tried to lock them down more). These should be export controlled and geo-locked as they are arguably much more powerful than any missile.

syntaxing

I noticed this the other day with the Anthropic upholding its redline. I think this is the first time in history where consumer tech exceeds military tech. Historically, it was always military tech trickles down to consumer.

redgridtactical

The dual-use problem with Starlink is really just the most visible version of something happening across the military. Phones with civilian GPS chips are increasingly used alongside dedicated mil-spec hardware, simply because the commercial stuff is more usable and gets updated faster. 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.

santiago-pl

Si vis pacem, para bellum. 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.

dev1ycan

We are already in some sense past the threshold of sats required for a potential civlizational collapse that would be caused by the loss of access to space. 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.

omegadynamics

"StarShield"

exabrial

I watch CappyArmy on YouTube. Was shocked recently to learn that Russia had widely deployed StarLink in Ukraine to get orders to the front lines. 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?

infinitewars

Musk started SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin, the guy who invented large constellations of military satellites to win a nuclear war. And then he funded Starlink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin

cryptonector

This comes across as whining.