Many of us knew Musk was weaponizing Starlink for additional C&C capacity for the US, but this is a step further. This threatens near constant surveillance and to change the game. It demands a response and will require major, major efforts using new technologies to take out this capability in a hot war between China and the US.

I personally find it ridiculous that the US is weaponizing space to this extent and yet Russia is just supposed to sit by and not take out their satellites which are feeding live intelligence which results in the deaths of Russian soldiers and civilians to Ukraine and which makes the US an active party to the conflict. Merely because these assets are very, very, very high off the ground in space are they spared whereas were they in the skies, on the ground they’d have been taken out by now as they’ve taken out missile systems manned by US personnel already.

The US is exploiting the good nature of China and Russia and their own desires not to create a Kessler syndrome situation or generally have to deal with militarizing space to take things to the n’th degree of ridiculousness. Make no mistake, I wouldn’t be surprised if some or all of these satellites also have a mode and a plan to use them as anti-satellite weapons against Russian or Chinese assets, maybe electronic warfare and jamming, maybe kinetic.

The answer of course is to develop solutions to take out the entire network, not differentiating between so-called civilian (actually dual use) Starlink and this kind of equipment, to punish Musk badly for his good work creating cheap spying solutions to cover every inch of the earth with the spying eyes of the slowly crumbling US empire.

I get the desire not to escalate but I think it may in the end be misplaced. The US is incredibly arrogant and entitled and likes salami-slicing tactics, they’ll take a centimeter, then another, then an inch, then another inch, then a meter and so on each time they do something like this without a response. Every inch you let them take they assume as their right alone and not yours, they assume as accepted, a given, the normal, rules based order way of things. I’m not sure there are any good responses at the moment. I think though that the Chinese have the capability to match this kind of move and should with haste, but only over the US and the South China Sea as a purely reciprocal move. It would drive the US up a wall crazy, it could induce balloon, even Sputnik levels of paranoia and impotent rage and seething and perhaps a little perspective which is sorely needed. An even better though perhaps unrealistic solution would be a joint Chinese/Russian venture in this area that could have downlink stations in Russia and China and share the data excepting any data sensitive to China’s waters and territory.

Of course one problem with this is that neither China nor Russia maintain nor have interests in maintaining NSA type spy teams trained in space-flight while the US does and has active designs and intentions of installing hardware implants in non-US, particularly Russian and Chinese satellites to in the event of a conflict hack, electronically disable, or even physically destroy them and leave their enemies blind. Therefore such a plan would have to account for the difficulty of preventing so many satellites in such close orbit from being sabotaged in this way. (In the past there was a news report where the US leaked their L and their alarm at a Chinese spy satellite maneuvering away at speed from a US craft that approached it, it was a real goose_knife “to do what, approached it to do what?!?” moment)