It is no state secret that Donald Trump holds an affection for the Russian despot Vladimir Putin. The depth of that affection, well, only Trump knows. This affection biases him towards Putin and the invaders that have attempted to subjugate and destroy Ukraine. The Ukrainian president’s refusal to trump up a false investigation into Joe Biden at Trump’s pleading only further pushed Trump deeper into his embrace of Putin. Given this, and the antipathy toward Ukraine of Trump’s own number two, JD Vance, it is far from startling that the second Trump administration has done very little to aid Ukraine’s fight to survive as a democratic nation, but the revelations of the last couple of weeks are shocking.
The invasion of Ukraine ignited the first true large-scale war of the twenty-first century, and as with the first large-scale war of the twentieth century, it has brought with it massive technological changes to warfare with the wide and deep deployment of drones.
The United States used drones as a supplement in the Global War on Terror that followed the horrendous September 11th attacks. In that campaign, it affixed missiles to high-flying uncrewed aircraft and rained death down from these platforms, but what has happened in Ukraine is leaps ahead of that. Instead of a few very large and very costly drones, the Ukrainians are producing cheap disposable machines that can be dispatched in large swarms. It is these drones that allow the Ukrainians to strike deep into their enemy’s territory, destroy vital logistical and command-and-control targets, and bring the war home to Russia. The drones also allow the Ukrainians to intercept Russian drones and attacks on civilians as the Russians attempt to break Ukrainian will from the air. (Has that ever worked? Nazi bombing of London did not break the British, and Allied bombing of German cities did not break the Germans either.)
Starlink is a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that provides commercial low-latency, high-speed access to the internet via individual subscriber terminals. Starshield is a secure, military-grade service provided by SpaceX via specialized satellites, which use the Starlink network as a backbone for the hybrid system. US military assets connect to Starshield from secure, proprietary terminals that use strong encryption. To my knowledge, no one outside of the US military has access to Starshield terminals. That said, the Ukrainian military has access to Starshield, but from commercial Starlink terminals, and access to Starshield is critical to Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian attacks on their civilian population.
Overnight on October 13 to 14, Starshield in Ukraine stopped working if the receiving drone exceeded a speed of one hundred miles per hour (161 kilometers per hour). This crippled some of the Ukrainian defenses, and Russian attacks killed numerous civilians. As of this writing (October 22), it is unclear whether the speed restrictions have been eliminated; reports are in conflict.
There is also a deep conflict over the cause of the speed restrictions.
Elon Musk, owner of the Starlink and Starshield systems, said on Twitter, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” but left out of his statements that Ukraine uses Starshield via Starlink terminals, an elements that would appear to be entirely under Musk’s control.. It should be noted that Musk has shown a bias towards Russia in the conflict, parroting the Trump administration’s position that the Ukrainians should compromise with their invaders to end the war.
The Trump administration has made contradictory statements on the speed limits suddenly appearing on the system, suggesting that it is merely a technical fault that has been corrected and suggesting that the system’s owner, Musk, initiated the cap, with Trump saying, “It wasn’t me.”
Reporting from The Telegraph indicated that Musk came to President Trump with the proposal to limit Ukrainian defenses by way of the speed cap and that the White House agreed to the action. The Wall Street Journal reports that Musk and Trump conferred on the possibility of limited Starshield for the Ukrainians without saying who imitated the concept, but that Musk ordered the reduction. Reuters reports that the order to do so came out of the White House. The White House has disputed the reporting, throwing responsibility back solely to Musk.
This is a deeply troubling incident. Does one man, in this case, Musk, have the ability to cripple another nation’s defenses at his whim? Is the U.S. government undercutting a nation’s ability to deal with an aggressive invasion for the personal and petty purposes of the president without consultation with either the other branches of our government or our allies?
Since everyone involved on the US side, civilian and political, are liars, we cannot, at this moment, know the truth, but change is coming. It is a near certainty that the Democratic Party will gain control of the House of Representatives, and it is a better than even chance they will also control the Senate. Next year, the subpoenas will fly, and perhaps the world’s richest man will flee the nation to avoid the harsh questioning that will surely follow.
