When War Meets WiFi: The Catastrophic Gamble of Privatized National Security
When the Battlefield Depends on Broadband: The Global Risk of Elon Musk Rage-Quitting a War
In a world increasingly defined by digital infrastructure, the line between a service and a sovereign asset has grown dangerously thin. Nowhere is this more obvious, or more perilous, than in Ukraine, where the outcome of a war may hinge on a billionaire’s whim.
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network has become the invisible scaffolding propping up Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion. From drone operations to battlefield communications, from hospital connectivity to military command centers, Starlink is the glue holding Ukraine’s digital warfighting capacity together. And that glue, it turns out, is made of brittle stuff, subject to the moods, ideologies, and political affiliations of one man.
In March, Musk made the chilling claim that “the entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,” reminding the world not only of Starlink’s dominance, but of his own unaccountable power. This isn’t a hypothetical. In 2022, he already denied a Ukrainian request to activate Starlink over Crimea, effectively blocking a drone strike on Russian ships. He justified the decision by saying he didn’t want SpaceX to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war.” But implicit complicity, by way of dependence, seems to be another matter entirely.
Now, with Musk a top advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump and increasingly intertwined with the administration’s foreign and domestic policy apparatus, the threat is no longer abstract. It’s architectural. The battlefield itself, and the fate of a sovereign nation, rests on a private system operated outside any democratic chain of command.
Europe sees the danger. That’s why defense firms like Leonardo, Airbus, and Thales are quietly trying to build a satellite communications alliance, a European answer to the strategic chokehold Musk now represents. Italy has already suspended its negotiations with SpaceX for secure military communications, following domestic outcry over Musk’s controversial comments on Ukraine. Defense officials said Starlink might still be an option in the future, but the message is clear: they want out. Or at least, they want a plan B.
The European Commission, too, is scrambling. Its long-term sovereign satellite network, IRIS², is now a multibillion-euro project, but it’s delayed and won’t be fully operational until sometime in the 2030s. That’s years too late for Ukraine and possibly too late for Europe’s own strategic independence.
It’s not that European firms like Eutelsat or the Leonardo-Airbus-Thales consortium are unqualified. It’s that they’ve arrived at the party a decade too late. While Starlink deployed over 42,000 user kits to Ukraine, Eutelsat’s CEO recently admitted they couldn’t come close to replacing it. They might be able to support some critical government operations, and emergency communications, perhaps, but not the full bandwidth of a modern, connected military effort.
And so we arrive at a grotesque paradox. The tools of national defense, once the guarded purview of public institutions, backed by constitutions, parliaments, and treaties, are now accessed through subscription plans, subject to terms of service, and controlled by a man whose ideology shifts with the algorithm. The telecommunications infrastructure of a sovereign country is no longer a matter of national resilience but of corporate discretion.
This is the logical endpoint of decades of neoliberal dogma: the idea that the private sector is always more efficient, more innovative, and more deserving of control. But efficiency is not accountability. Innovation is not loyalty. And control, when placed in the hands of the unaccountable, becomes a threat rather than a solution.
In real-time, we are watching the consequences of allowing critical infrastructure to be privatized without guardrails. And if Europe is just now waking up to that reality, the question must be asked: how many wars, or collapses, or cyber blackouts must we endure before we understand that public good cannot be left in private hands?
It’s as if the war were being fought inside a live session of Path of Exile, and Elon Musk is the only player with admin privileges, able to rage quit, change the map, or pull the server plug at any moment. The stakes aren’t digital loot or leaderboard rankings, they’re hospitals, drone strikes, and the lives of soldiers on the ground. Elon Musk didn’t invade Ukraine. But he can decide whether the defenders have internet. That alone should terrify us.