As if there’s not enough bad news going around, the latest fiasco from the Trump administration involves the apparently deliberate outage of the Starshield system that assists the defense of Ukraine from Russia’s war. This is, rightly, a major national security scandal. Politically, it also undercuts the administration’s effort to defend the unpopular war with Iran by arguing that, hey, at least you’re paying for us to be the serious grownups on national security. Whatever this is, it’s neither responsible behavior nor good domestic politics, which is why nobody is claiming responsibility.
To briefly summarize a story that has been covered in more depth by my colleagues Noah Rothman and Andy McCarthy, Starshield is a companion product of the Starlink satellite internet service, provided by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to the Pentagon, which gives access to Starshield to the Ukrainian government. It provides the internet age’s equivalent of radar surveillance capabilities, which are useful to the Ukrainian war effort both in defending Ukrainian military and civilian targets from Russia, and in targeting Russian assets for Ukraine’s offensive actions. It can be particularly useful in detecting incoming aerial assaults.
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