Last summer, a scene played out off the coast of California that should have kept planners at the Pentagon awake at night. Two dozen unmanned US Navy surface vessels suddenly lost contact with their base, drifting idle for almost an hour. The cause was not a drone software error or hostile jamming, but a global failure of the Starlink network. This incident, revealed in internal documents, sheds new light on the US military’s risky dependence on Elon Musk’s technology on the eve of SpaceX‘s historic IPO.
SpaceX’s valuation, which is expected to reach $2 trillion this summer, rests on the foundation of almost complete dominance of a niche but crucial infrastructure. With a constellation of nearly 10,000 satellites in low orbit, Starlink has become an indispensable system for the military. It offers a scale and resilience to attacks that traditional providers cannot replicate. However, tests in April 2025 showed that the system has its limits – with heavy data loads from multiple vehicles simultaneously, connectivity becomes unstable.
For the Pentagon, it is a stalemate situation. On the one hand, Starlink is cheap, widespread and technically years ahead of the competition. On the other, it becomes a ‘single point of failure’ in the national security architecture. The risk is not only technical but also political. Musk’s unpredictability – from the signal cut-off in Ukraine to the controversy over service availability in Taiwan – is causing Democratic lawmakers to warn ever more loudly against putting so much power in the hands of one billionaire.
Competitors are trying to catch up, as seen with Amazon’s recent $11.6 billion deal to acquire Globalstar. Still, alternatives to SpaceX remain in the promise or niche application phase for now. Experts, such as Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, suggest that the military is consciously accepting these weaknesses. In modern warfare, based on autonomy and mass, Starlinek’s ubiquity is too valuable to give up, even at the cost of occasional fleet paralysis.
