Pentagon Silent on Elon Musk and Starlink Risks as Military Use Expands

The military branches -- especially the Navy -- have been quietly integrating and becoming more dependent on satellite internet from SpaceX and Starlink while, at the same time, media reports have revealed that the man running both companies, Elon Musk, shares a cozy relationship with one of America's biggest adversaries.

In the past year, U.S. news outlets have reported that Musk, who oversees the satellite internet provider, has not only developed a close relationship with Vladimir Putin but has also acquiesced to his requests to shut off the service for Ukrainians at key moments of the war and is providing Starlink access to Russians.

Amid the reports, officials in the Pentagon and the services have refused to meaningfully engage with questions about Musk's relationship with the Defense Department or just how widespread Starlink technology has become among the force. But two top senators are urging an investigation of Musk, his Pentagon ties, and his communications with Moscow.

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On Friday, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a senior member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, called on both the Pentagon and the Justice Department to investigate Musk.

"We urgently call upon the U.S. government to open an investigation ... to determine whether this behavior should force a review of Mr. Musk's continued involvement in SpaceX's varying contracts with the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community," the pair wrote in a letter to the U.S. attorney general and inspector general of the Defense Department.

In a separate letter to the head of the Air Force, the pair added that "Mr. Musk's reported behavior could pose serious risks to national security, and as CEO of a company with billions of dollars in sensitive defense and intelligence contracts, warrant reconsideration of SpaceX's outsized role in DoD's commercial space integration."

Helping Troops Connect

The Navy has been the most public about its use of Starlink. The commander of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower told reporters that the service was an important way to keep morale up on the ship, which recently returned from a nine-month deployment to the Middle East.

Capt. Chris "Chowdah" Hill told attendees at a Military Reporters and Editors conference that the service "really helped people connect with their external support network in ways that we've never seen before."

Other experts like Brad Martin, a former Navy captain turned senior researcher at the Rand Corp. think tank, told Military.com that the service is also helpful because "there are administrative uses."

The extra bandwidth allows ships to more easily order parts, file paperwork and conduct a variety of other administrative tasks that are considered a lower priority for the main communications channels on a warship, Martin explained.

However, given that Starlink is not owned or operated by the U.S. government, both Martin and Hill say that there are security risks involved. Assessing just how significant those risks are is hard since the services are not interested in sharing how widespread Starlink has become.

Military.com reached out to the Navy and asked for the total number of ships that are running either Starlink or Starshield -- the military version of the satellite service -- but the sea service didn't answer the question, despite some of its officers talking about it to the media.

In his remarks to reporters, Hill said that "a couple" of ships have tried some version of the service, while a Navy spokesperson said that "the Navy has installed Starlink systems on various ships across the fleet."

In addition to the Eisenhower, a 2023 news release said the Navy's newest carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, had a system too.

The USS Manchester, a littoral combat ship, also apparently had a similar system installed this summer, according to a Navy investigation into a Starlink system that sailors aboard the ship had set up without permission from superiors.

Four months after the illegal Starlink system was set up, the ship was slated to have the Starshield system installed, which led one sailor to tell the ship's operations officer that "the Starshield installers may find something that shouldn't be there."

In September, the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, or NAVWAR, said that its "goal is to eventually have [satellite-powered internet] available on all Navy ships."

And the Navy isn't alone.

The Marine Corps confirmed to Military.com that it has been using "a ruggedized version of the Starshield terminal ... for over a year" to try and provide Marines communication abilities in "contested environments."

Like the Navy, while anecdotal evidence of the terminals' use by the Corps has cropped up on social media, the Marines refused to say just how widespread the system is within the service.

In the fall of 2023, the Space Force also awarded Starshield a $70 million contract, though details on how the service plans to use the internet are sparse.

Musk's Track Record with Russia, Starlink

According to Clayton Swope, a researcher and aerospace security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there are plenty of things that the Navy and other branches can do to protect their data from unauthorized access.

Encryption and use of virtual private network, or VPN, technologies should prevent hackers from accessing whatever data the military chooses to send over Starlink and, as of this summer, the Navy was not authorizing any classified information to be transmitted over the network.

However, Starlink's implementation in the Ukraine war raises major concerns about the system's vulnerabilities and, more importantly, the man running the show.

In August 2023, The Debrief, citing Ukrainian officials, reported that Russia had conducted "large-scale cyberattacks to obtain unauthorized access to Android devices possessed by Ukrainian military personnel for planning and performing combat missions" and installed malicious software whose "functional purpose is to gather data from the Starlink satellite system."

But bigger questions loom over Elon Musk -- the man who owns and operates the entire system. Musk's influence is likely to grow dramatically after he helped reelect President-elect Donald Trump and is set to co-chair a commission that aims to slash the federal government, which includes the Pentagon. In the days after the election, Musk has become one of Trump's closest advisers and reportedly met with Iranian officials to discuss ways to defuse tensions in the Middle East.

In September 2023, a biography on Musk, later confirmed by the man himself, revealed that he thwarted an attack by Ukraine on Russian-held territory in Crimea by shutting off the Starlink service to the country. The act was presented as something Musk decided himself, and it earned him praise from top Russian official and former President Dmitry Medvedev.

"It looks like Musk is the last adequate mind in North America," Medvedev wrote on Musk's social media platform X.

However, a year later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had been in contact with Putin since late 2022, and he also spoke with top Putin aide Sergei Kiriyenko as recently as this year.

The report also noted that Musk had not just been willing to block Starlink access to Ukraine. At some point, at Putin's request, he avoided activating his Starlink service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, Musk has been called out by Ukrainian officials for what they saw as interference with their plans and operations. But Musk argued on social media that if he "had agreed to [the Ukrainians'] request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation."

While at the time Musk had made that argument it wasn't known he'd been in contact with Putin, he had already been criticized over numerous comments that were seen as pro-Russian. He groused over the cost of providing the service to Ukraine and cheered on comments from Medvedev.

According to Swope, the comparison between Ukraine and the U.S. military is not "a one-for-one scenario where the U.S. government could find itself in a similar situation."

"The relationship with the U.S. government is really important for both," Swope argued, adding that he thinks it would be very unlikely that Musk and Starlink would similarly shut off service to the American military.

"I think, from a business standpoint, I don't see SpaceX doing that. But also from a vision standpoint, no ... that vision is dependent on this, you could say beneficial flywheel effect, the relationship it has with the U.S. government," he said.

This is an argument that the Pentagon itself has articulated.

Last August, the top Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, when faced with questions about Musk's behavior after a high-profile article in The New Yorker once again reported on his Ketamine use, told reporters that the Defense Department has "well-developed processes and procedures to look at things like contracts and services that are person-independent -- personality-independent."

However, the Defense Department has refused to answer whether Musk, with his growing closeness to Putin and other top Russian officials, is afforded a security clearance and access to closely guarded military secrets.

Both the Navy and Marine Corps when asked by Military.com refused to answer any questions about Musk or any security risks he poses.

When asked by Military.com in late October if the Pentagon was investigating the reports of contact with Putin, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said she couldn't corroborate the report and wouldn't say whether the department was investigating.

Bound by Contracts

Swope argued that the examples of cutoff service in Ukraine are a "reflection of that lack of a contractual relationship that specified how the service would be used" and not an issue that would exist for the U.S. military.

"You can show that all the boxes are checked from a security standpoint, cybersecurity, whatever contractual requirements are placed on that company to make sure the government is certain it knows what it's getting and what it's agreeing to," he said.

"That's what companies are signing up for, effectively."

What is clear: Separating Musk from SpaceX and the two from government work is far from easy.

At the moment, SpaceX holds more than $700 million in contracts for Space Force's National Security Space Launch program, and a $1.8 billion dollar classified contract with the National Reconnaissance Agency, the agency that is tasked with running the nation's network of spy satellites.

Swope notes that this reliance also goes the other way around -- "the government is still a really important customer for SpaceX," he said.

But this reliance has, according to The New Yorker, resulted in deference to Musk by even the highest of Pentagon officials.

The Pentagon's policy chief, then-Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl, was reduced to pleading with Musk not to cut off Starlink access to Ukraine, according to an article that was published in October 2023.

Experts like Swope also note that the relationship is only likely to grow in the future.

"To me, it's not so much that I'm worried about the government using more SpaceX -- I personally am worried if ... it's the other way, if they use less," Swope said. "There's no way around it. ... SpaceX plays such a big role in where we are in space today, that the obvious answer is just we need to lean hard on SpaceX or we're not going to be able to keep up the competition with China."

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