Starlink has become an integral part of the military and civil response to Russia’s invasion. It is not just allowing Ukraine to fight back; it is shaping how it does so
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAnd a huge part of the traffic flowing through the system currently comes from Ukraine. Starlink has become an integral part of the country’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion.
By May around 150,000 people were using the system every day. The government quickly grew to rely on it for various communication needs, including, on occasion, the transmission of the nightly broadcast by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Because the dishes and their associated terminals are easily portable and can be rigged to run off a car battery, they are ideal for use in a country where the electricity and communication networks are regularly pounded by Russian missiles.
This kind of connectivity is something no previous army has enjoyed. Western armies fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq had access to some vast flows of data. For the most part, though they found it very hard to get that information to where it was needed in a timely manner. If its signals cannot be jammed, the system itself could be attacked instead. In September the Russian delegation to aworking group on space security hinted that, despite its status as a nominally civilian system, Starlink might be considered a legitimate military target under international humanitarian law—which is probably a fair assessment.
And when satellites are small and mass-produced, as the Starlink ones are, they can be replaced with much less fuss than would previously have been the case. Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, an, reckons that Starlink’s use in Ukraine marks “the beginning of the end” for the value of anti-satellite missiles. “[It] turns out they’re only useful if your adversary relies on small numbers of really large/expensive satellites.
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