UKRAINE’S SECRET WEAPON

Ukraine has a secret weapon in its war with Russia.  Only it’s not the firepower we’ve seen donated to them from NATO countries.  And it comes courtesy of an unlikely source—Elon Musk’s SpaceX.  It’s in the form of an off-grid high-bandwidth internet network named Starlink. It services consumers in 45 countries with as many as a million subscribers.  It has become an invaluable tool for Ukraine by enabling and enhancing its military’s communications.

C4ISR:  In military parlance this refers to command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or in other words the backbone of the military’s ability to communicate to its working parts.  Most satellite communications are managed through giant satellites orbiting at an altitude of over 22,000 miles, enabling coverage of huge areas of the earth’s surface at once.  Starlink’s satellites orbit at a much lower 350 miles in altitude covering a smaller area for a shorter period of time, but bringing a much bigger bandwidth to the user.  Further, the signals sent though the Starlink system are digital and take less time to process.  The satellite goes out of range in a matter of minutes, but is quickly replaced with another one passing in the same orbit.  There are over 3,300 satellites in the Starlink network with more being added each week. 

More Difficult to Hack:  Because of the ubiquitous nature of the network (it seems like it’s everywhere at the same time) and the brief time each component satellite is within range, it is difficult to block or destroy.  For example, Ukrainian troops can identify targets and upload encrypted images that are delivered to a group chat that includes artillery commanders.  The officers then evaluate the targets within the scope of the overall battle plan and decide which ones to attack and when.  The orders are returned to the firing lines and then carried out, sometimes within minutes.  In previous wars this process involved verbal communications that took much longer to process, covered smaller radiuses, and could be compromised.  Even in Iraq and Afghanistan where much digital data was available, it was harder to get the information from its source to its intended users in a timely manner.  With Starlink, helicopter or bomber pilots while in flight could receive targeting information directly from a satellite feed rather that from radio signals back and forth.  Further, the satellite signals would be more secure and more rapidly retrieved than radio transmissions which could be falsified. 

Reduced Vulnerability:  Starlink is not specifically a military system—it just happens to be a very effective tool that evolved at the perfect time for Ukraine.  However, both Russia and China are working on countermeasures as they are concerned about how effective this civilian system can be for military purposes.  Cyber attacks are a possibility, but SpaceX has the methodology for apply patches and fixes to Starlink in a very rapid manner.  Missiles can be used to knock the satellites out, but destroying one satellite does very little good, and destroying many at once might be impossible.  In any case, the satellites are easily and readily replaceable.  Jamming the satellites with signals using sophisticated electronic warfare equipment may also be too difficult to use in combat situations.  Starlink’s signals themselves are more powerful, and the sending dishes are small and mobile.  They distribute narrow, tightly-focused beams that follow the satellites as they pass through the sky.  Ground stations that process signals back and forth with the Starlink system could be targeted.  But most of them are located in nearby NATO countries, and attacking them would constitute an escalation against NATO. 

Advantage SpaceX:  The success that Ukraine’s military has had against Russia owing in large part to Starlink has prompted other countries to develop their own low-flying orbiting satellite systems.  Russia, China, India, Britain, and even the EU all have designs to build and deploy their own low-level satellite systems.  Starlink faces competition even in America from a similar system named Kuiper that’s being financed by Jeff Bezos.  But SpaceX has a huge advantage in that it has the independent capability of launching its own satellites in rapid fashion.  The reusable Falcon-9 rocket can deliver 50 satellites into orbit per launch, and SpaceX currently launches a Falcon-9 more often than once per week.  SpaceX is developing another reusable spacecraft named Starship that would have the capability of placing 400 satellites into Starlink per launch. 

Conclusion:  Starlink, Ukraine’s secret weapon in its war with Russia, has changed the nature of warfare on the ground as it provides timeliness and accuracy to the Ukrainian military.  It has gotten the attention of nearly every country on earth that is faced with some form of external military threat.  It may have rendered useless the strategy of using high-flying, powerful satellites for C4ISR that can be destroyed by conventional means.

Sources:  The Economist, The Satellites That Saved Ukraine, January 7^th, 2023.