"At the end of 2022, Musk announced the launch of a service called Starshield. Reserved for military clients, it costs far more to use than Starlink. In Ukraine’s case, the U.S. government has paid for a lot of that service, handing Musk’s company a sizable windfall. In exchange, the Pentagon gets more control over Ukraine’s access to the satellites. Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense, negotiated this arrangement with SpaceX, and he later told The New Yorker that it would “prevent Musk from turning off the switch.”
But, for the most part, the Ukrainian military did not transition to using Starshield. It continued to use regular Starlink antennas, the kind available at Walmart and other retailers around the world. Their service costs as little as $30 a month, compared to as much as $25,000 for Starshield. The fine print in the Starlink user agreement bans its use for military purposes. But Musk’s company did not enforce that rule in Ukraine. It maintained the pretense that Starlink would be reserved for peaceful purposes, while the military would rely on Starshield antennas, largely paid for by American taxpayers. The reality was quite different. “They’re using it for everything,” the senior U.S. military officer told us of Ukrainian reliance on Starlink. “Drones, command and control, tactical communication on the battlefield.”
