It is outrageous that Elon Musk should have unilaterally prevented Ukraine from launching marine drones against Russia’s illegally occupied Sevastopol naval base on the Black Sea. He interfered with Ukrainian war goals and plans, apparently after Russia’s ambassador to Washington (whom Musk consulted and to whom Musk may have leaked Ukraine’s intention) threatened a nuclear response if Ukraine succeeded. Ukraine is fighting to survive, to defend our freedoms as democrats and believers in peace. It should not have to fend off Musk, too.
What Musk did in September 2022 was to turn off his Starlink satellite coverage around Crimea, thus making it impossible for Ukraine to navigate its maritime drones toward the naval base. “If I had agreed to their request,” Musk wrote on X, “then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” That was his view, perhaps influenced by Putin’s emissaries and perhaps concerned about his satellites being shot out of the sky, but it need not have been the preferences of Washington or Kyiv. What was Musk doing interfering with strategic imperatives?
According to an acerbic commentator: “His national security thinking is at best juvenile and fatuous. The idea that such a call was Musk’s to make is as absurd as it is terrifying.” And, “You simply can’t have critical national security infrastructure in the hands of a Twitter troll who’s a soft touch for whichever foreign autocrat blows some smoke up his behind. But that’s what we have here,” says Josh Marshall, writing in Backchannel.
Jennifer Szalai’s review of Walter Isaacson’s just published biography in yesterday’s New York Times suggests that Musk is “a mercurial ‘man-child,’’ somewhere along the Asperger syndrome, who is “bad at picking up social cues.” He also “lacks empathy.” All of these factors -- plus his undoubted innovative mentality and extraordinary commercial success – complicate any evaluation of his attempt both to assist Ukraine’s struggle against Putin’s Russia and his possibly genuine fear that Putin could retaliate by blowing the planet to smithereens.
Ukraine has made extensive use of naval drones. But it at least sounds like September’s foray was supposed to be an arrayed attack that could have inflicted extensive damage on the Russian navy and the naval port itself and thus could have degraded Russia’s ability to launch missile attacks against Ukraine. That was the positive plan that Musk interrupted.
Starlink is a network of satellites providing robust internet connectivity without reliance on any ground infrastructure.
Starlink was developed in part thanks to official Pentagon contracts. In essence, the U.S. government provided the funds to build SpaceX – the launching platform for the Starlink satellites -- by awarding Musk contracts that made SpaceX’s business success possible. Musk and SpaceX are U.S. military contractors. That makes Musk responsible for actions that support U. S. international security initiatives. He does not get to become an individual actor in the international realm.
Starlink launches sensitive national security satellites for Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office. It lofts more rockets than any other company or country and operates more satellites than any other entity on Earth. It has put more than 4,500 satellites into orbit. More than half of the operating satellites above us are owned and serviced by Musk.
Starlink is not just a commercial invention of Musk and his team. It is an immensely valuable and perhaps the most advanced of the privately deployed satellite systems that now give governments, armies, and ordinary consumers the ability to steer missiles and drones remotely, provide internet service without cell towers or landlines, and offer important communication capacities in remote areas of the world as well as in heavily contested theaters of war.
As the richest man in the world, as an innovative rocket maker and automobile impresario, Musk has unparalleled leverage globally. In the case of Starlink (as well as Tesla and SpaceX, not to mention plain old X), he has a splendid project that gave Ukraine a critical workaround when Russia jammed its internet, bombed its cell towers, and shut down Ukraine’s long accustomed method of pursuing battlefield objectives. The existence of Starlink now makes it possible for Ukrainian drones to be sent at night across the Russian front lines, for those drones to be seen and directed by Ukrainian military controllers, and for the information provided by the drones to be distributed to intelligence and attack commanders attempting to overcome Russian defenses, their mines, and their concrete obstacles.
Ukraine’s redoubtable defense since February 2022 would not have been possible without Starlink and without Musk’s giving Ukraine 42,000 Starlink terminals. Musk cannot be faulted for coming to the aid of Ukraine that manner. And, although he did threaten last year to stop providing his Starlink service to Ukraine for free, he thought better of that maneuver. However, the Pentagon now purchases Starlink coverage for Ukraine and manages some of its uses.
It is time roundly to condemn Musk for stepping out of his technological zone and aborting President Volodymyr Zelensky’s war tactics. While we are about it, we should also be concerned that Musk’s is allowing Russian trolls to use X (the old Twitter) to disseminate propaganda. A European Union study revealed last week that more false news invented by Russia was reaching more people on X than before the invasion of Ukraine. Musk has even started to sue the Anti-Defamation League and others for criticizing X’s failure under his watch to halt the dissemination of fake news. “It’s really scary to see him using his corporate resources to try to squash critics and skeptics,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
Let us rein Musk in, and avoid as much as possible doing business with him and his commercial ventures. That is at least one answer to his attempt to substitute his judgment for Ukraine’s in countering Putin’s horrific invasion.
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First-rate of course ... sadly, I fear we are long past the point where it is even feasible to rein in this despicable individual who is clearly utterly incapable of distinguishing good from evil in commerce, media, and especially it would appear on the battlefield.