Elon Musk shouldn’t get to decide how Ukraine fights - The Washington Post

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I can’t feel sympathy for Elon Musk, given the cesspool of antisemitism, hate speech and authoritarian bombast he is creating at X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But if he prevented Ukrainian forces from attacking Russia’s Black Sea fleet — well, that’s really on us, not on him.

Musk has acknowledged that he refused a request from the Ukrainian military last September to activate the Starlink satellite communications network, operated by the Musk-founded SpaceX, over Russian-occupied Crimea. Turning the network on would have allowed explosives-laden Ukrainian submarine drones to be guided toward Russia’s big naval base at Sevastopol and detonated. According to the new book “Elon Musk,” by biographer Walter Isaacson, the drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.”

The Ukrainians’ “obvious intent” was “to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” Musk posted last week on X. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” He has repeatedly fretted that the war in Ukraine could mushroom into World War III.

I think Musk’s analysis is wrong; others might think he is right. But we all should agree that an impulsive billionaire, unsure of whether he wants to be a superhero or a Bond villain, should not have been in a position to make that call. No private citizen should be making such unilateral decisions about our national security.

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Musk was the decider because his constellation of more than 4,500 low-Earth-orbit Starlink satellites has been vital to Ukraine’s armed forces, providing internet service that the Russian military, despite its best efforts, has been unable to jam.

At the outset of the war, when it became clear how vital Starlink was to the Ukrainian war effort, Musk donated thousands of portable terminals — along with Tesla batteries to power them in areas where electricity had been cut off. He was, in a very real sense, a savior for Ukraine’s freedom fighters. But without telling Ukrainian authorities, he disabled the service over Crimea — which Russia had invaded and “annexed” in 2014 — fearing that Russian President Vladimir Putin would see attacks there as attacks on the motherland and possibly respond with nuclear weapons.

When Ukraine launched its submarine drone assault and found there was no Starlink service, officials begged Musk to turn on the system. He declined. He also resisted allowing Starlink to be used in other Russian-controlled areas that Ukrainian soldiers were bravely fighting to recapture.

As portrayed by Isaacson, Musk consistently overestimates Russia’s military prowess and Putin’s willingness to escalate his war of conquest into an Armageddon. But whether Musk’s geopolitical vision is blurry or crystal clear, he should not have had to make these decisions.

Isaacson quotes Musk as complaining, “How am I in this war? ... Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

I have a better question: What is the Pentagon doing with the more than $800 billion we are spending this year on defense?

It is unacceptable that the world’s richest man can, at a whim, turn on and off such a vital communications network. I don’t know what Musk thinks about the possibility that Chinese President Xi Jinping will launch an invasion of Taiwan — though I do know that China is the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles and that Musk is trying awfully hard to sell Tesla automobiles there. I don’t know what he thinks about China’s border dispute with Pakistan or what he thinks about the Middle East. I really shouldn’t have to care.

The U.S. government should deploy its own low-Earth-orbit satellite array, whose use would be determined by the president and the military chain of command. We spend far more on defense than any other nation, on the premise that we’re buying the latest, most advanced, most effective gadgets on the planet. If our aid to Ukraine is so beholden to one man — three of whose 10 children are named Techno Mechanicus, Exa and X — we’re doing something seriously wrong.

Of course, to launch our government-owned satellites, we’ll probably need the reusable rockets developed by SpaceX or those made by Blue Origin (a private company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Post). Putting men on the moon was an epic national quest, in which we were all invested. Landing humans on Mars is being outsourced to the billionaires.