How Silicon Valley is calling the shots on the battlefields of Ukraine |
Sometime in the late morning of February 4, somebody at SpaceX headquarters pressed a computer key. A command line was beamed to Starlink’s 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit. Their onboard processors, circling 550 kilometers above the Earth, instantly obeyed the command and fractionally changed their operational settings. Back down on the frozen ground, in the trenches, bunkers and ruined cities of Russian-occupied Ukraine, hundreds of Starlink terminals lost internet connectivity. As another freezing night set in, the Russian army’s drones and tactical comms went dark.
“We are left without communication!” complained a frontline Russian military officer in a video posted on the Telegram channel “Voenkory Russian Spring.” “Virtually on all fronts it has become difficult to control the troops, fighters write to us and ask us to help with equipment – radio bridges and radios.” Posts on the channel urged volunteers to raise money to buy walkie-talkies. “Belorussian Silovik,” another Russian military blog, warned, “it will now become dramatically clear that units without communications cannot operate effectively. This will be news for some in high offices.”
A man with a keyboard in California has the power of life and death half a world away
A man with a keyboard in California has the power of life and death half a world away
According to the “Military Observer” blog, the Russian army “simply has no alternative to Starlink… much, including combat control, was tied to it.” Most of the units had been obtained on the black market by the Russian army. A day after the Starlink shutdown, the Ukrainian General Staff’s daily action report logged just 56 Russian assaults compared to between 80 to 110 forearlier days. In the weeks after the Starlink shutdown Ukraine recaptured 201 square kilometers of territory from Russia in five days – its biggest gain since 2022.
The reality of modern war is that a man with a keyboard in California has the power of life and death half the world away. The Russia-Ukraine war has become the first major conflict where commercial technology companies – not government defense labs – have provided the backbone of a nation’s wartime capabilities. Silicon Valley is, in a very real sense, a major combatant in Ukraine. Without the independent, portable, high-speed wireless internet connectivity that Starlink provides, Ukraine would have “lost this war long ago,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last year.
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Starlink is not the only Silicon Valley behemoth to have made a profound difference to the course of the war. Peter Thiel’s Palantir, the data analytics, AI........