Elon Musk says he withheld Starlink over Crimea to avoid escalation | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says he withheld Starlink over Crimea to avoid escalation

bbc.com

18 pointstareqak17 comments

Feels like the elephant in the room here is...why can't the US military deploy Starlink capabilities themselves? Is this not meaningful defense technology to own themselves / worthy of legitimate defense research+spending? Feels like with the amount of taxes going into defense, USG and their allies shouldn't have to rely on Elon to make strategically sound decisions

The US military has a bunch of comms satellites. That does not mean the Ukraine military has access to them.

They have access to GPS which is us military. I believe the commenter was suggesting that providing this access in the way GPS is provided would be a passive way to support countries like Ukraine.

This is again a situation where we think we're entitled to a service because we paid for it and that's how capitalism is supposed to work. Unfortunately the service fee doesn't give you power over the whims of the business or it's owner to withhold service from anyone anytime for any reason. This is what the over-long eula boils down to. A legal exemption from fulfilling the basic obligation of a capitalist exchange.

GPS is broadcast only, there is no communications back to the satellite. GPS is provided to everyone.

The military has had communication satellites since the late 1950s. The military's use case is different enough from civilian applications that they build their own systems which have very different properties from starlink.

Here is the US military constellation satellite system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milstar

The US is working on constellations using SpaceX Starshield technology. This is being done under Space Development Agency (SDA) which is resurrection of SDI. They are working on tracking and communications for tracking. They are talking about communications constellation but not soon.

This is great to know! I wasn't aware - I appreciate the attentive response here specifically tailored around Starlink's class of capabilities.

The United States is not at war with Russia.

We may be funding and equipping a proxy, but we are not at war with them.

>allies shouldn't have to rely on Elon to make strategically sound decisions

What makes you think allowing AFU to use Starlink in this matter is a strategically sound decision?

Apparently the Russians ships that he saved by sabotaging the Ukrainian effort has helped the Russians to continue bombing civilians. Those ships have been using their missiles from the Black Sea. He doesn't seem to have thought out his decision and helped the Russian Military whether it was intentional or not. In the end that decision cost some civilians their lives....

ueah bur his reason was that allowing the attack would have triggered a russian response with even more deaths. musk thought the response would be nuclear and then ww3 but most likely would have been some rocket attack in a cafe, etc. like few days ago.

avoiding escalation seems like a sensible thing at this point as it’s clear neither side can easily win.

Exactly.

Pulling out was the correct decision which both of these sides should not benefit from increased escalation rather than the continuation of war which should not have escalated to invasion in the first place.

Here is an informative article based on reality. It may not be part of the narrative you want to push....but it is accurate.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-war

>Ukraine did want to press forward last year, before the fortifications were built. It lacked the necessary weapons, and Elon Musk chose to cut Ukraine off from communications. That move likely extended the war. Because Musk’s decision was based on his internalization of Russian propaganda about nuclear war, and was accompanied by his repetition of that propaganda, he made a nuclear war more likely. If powerful men convey the message that just talking about nuclear war is enough to win conventional wars, then we will have more countries with nuclear weapons and more conventional wars that can escalate into nuclear ones. Ukraine has been resistant to this line of Russian fearmongering, fortunately for us all.

Maybe I missed it, but where in this essay does this professor explain what, exactly, the national interest is for the United States in enabling this war to continue?

Read it again, you missed it.

Okay I read it again. Do you mean this?

> The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War.

Because this is a fever dream. One has to imagine an entirely different trajectory of post 1990s history for this to be true.

> avoiding escalation seems like a sensible thing at this point as it’s clear neither side can easily win.

Im not sure how giving a country being invaded the weapons it need to defend itself is "escalation".

What do you mean by "sabotaging" the Ukrainian effort ? He denied the Ukrainians Starlink extension into Crimea - which is Russian territory and Starlink does not service Russia anyways. Starlink's terms of use prohibit military use also and this would have been heavy use of Starlink explicitly in a military op.

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