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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming?

For one, by making it harder to jam in the first place. Starlink with its extremely directional antennas is a good example - an opponent would need an equally massive fleet of satellites or high-altitude ECM planes to jam it, and the latter ones can easily be targeted by anti-radar rockets.

This is why the US government has been pushing insane amounts of money into SpaceX... Starlink is the future of interconnected wars.

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SpaceX is not fully under operational control of the US government, if some of the reports from Twitter about geofencing are to be believed.

I have yet to see a credible report of them denying a US government request.

Big big big big difference between "they usually do what we ask" and "we have operational authority over this system, and can court martial anyone that impedes its operation"

Isn't everyone with the root password a US Citizen? Last time I checked SpaceX's job opening, a US clearance was required.

Assuming that the US ever enters any war directly, guess what their first action will be: take Musk out of the picture, deal with the legalities later on.

The legality isn't in question; Defense Production Act very much applies.

Which is partly why the DoD commissioned a second constellation specifically for military use: https://www.spacex.com/starshield/

Wow. Is there any concrete info about the build-out? Or do you think they will just provision X% of existing sats / bandwidth to military use? I recall learning years ago that modern "long lines" (telco) were all pure data lines, where a certain portion was reserved for guaranteed bandwidth required for (voice) telephone calls.

> Starlink is the future of interconnected wars.

Maybe, but what do you figure the US military will use?

Starshield

A near peer adversary will attempt to degrade Starlink (and other military satellite constellations) as their first step in any major conflict. China is making huge investments into EW, cyber, and ASAT. The US military has to plan to fight with little or no satellite support.

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