A collective sigh of relief rippled through Western capitals this morning upon news that Ukraine’s Starlink network has settled into something resembling stability. The signals have resumed their obedient transit across the ionosphere; the artillery spotters are once more synchronized with their digital eyes; the disruptions—whatever bureaucratic or technical pretext cloaked them—have quietly vanished. We are meant, I suppose, to applaud this return to form. We are invited to celebrate the marvelous efficacy of modern telecommunications and the benevolent efficiency of private enterprise in coming to the rescue of embattled democracies.
Pardon me if I decline to join the chorus.
The trouble with sighs of relief is that they rarely leave room for inconvenient questions. Consider, for a moment, the grotesque novelty of our present condition. Carl von Clausewitz spilled gallons of ink dissecting the nature of friction, political will, and the state’s monopoly on violence, but he never envisioned a world where the nervous system of an existential war would be governed by a tech company’s end-user license agreement. A sovereign nation, bleeding in the mud for its territorial survival, finds its tactical coherence held hostage not merely by enemy jammer pods, but by the bandwidth throttles and erratic mood swings of a private boardroom in California.
How quickly we have grown accustomed to this digital feudalism. In centuries past, kings and parliaments at least understood the humiliation of relying upon foreign mercenaries; they paid their condottieri with gritted teeth and watched them warily, fully aware that a hired sword owes no loyalty to the realm. Today, our foreign policy mandarins hail the corporate oligarch as an indispensable partner in the defense of liberty. When the switch is flipped off—or slightly dimmed—we fret and wring our hands; when the switch is flipped back on, we offer sheepish gratitude, entirely forgetting that the existence of the switch is itself an indictment of democratic statecraft.
What happens tomorrow when private interest inevitably collides with public necessity? War is not a consumer service, though the architects of the contemporary defense establishment have treated it as such. They have outsourced the sinews of military communication to low-Earth orbit transponders owned by a man who can, on any given Tuesday, decide that a particular peninsula should remain dark. To call this an operational vulnerability is to miss the larger philosophical tragedy: it is a total abdication of sovereign responsibility.
The Western establishment ceaselessly lectures the public on the sanctity of the rules-based international order, yet it has sleepwalked into an arrangement where national defense is essentially a high-priority subscription tier. We look upon medieval peasants who looked to their local barons for protection and we call it primitive, yet here stands a nation of forty million people, backed by the grandest military alliance in human history, waiting anxiously to see if an American billionaire will allow their drones to talk to their commanders.
The connection in Ukraine is stable today, yes. But the foundation upon which that stability rests is profoundly, dangerously hollow. When the history of this century is written, the scandal will not be that the satellites flickered; it will be that a free people ever allowed their survival to depend on the mercy of a private cloud.
— Cassius Wren