The Trump administration has spent months arguing that the ‘War’ Department won’t accept ‘terms of use’ limitations on battlefield tech.
If you believe Elon Musk unilaterally gave the order to impose speed restrictions in Ukraine on the Starshield system — the military application of the Starlink satellite communications system made by Musk’s SpaceX — then I have a bridge in Kyiv to sell you . . . if Putin hasn’t blown it to smithereens already.
President Trump and “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth figure you’ve forgotten, or were simply paying no attention, to their attempt to destroy Anthropic, the AI giant that — in a useful analogy to SpaceX Starlink/Starshield — provides our government a military version of Claude, its well-known large language model series. After threatening to confiscate the technology under the Defense Production Act, Secretary Pete Hegseth settled on an invocation of statutory “supply chain risk” (SCR) status against Anthropic (a first against an American company, as Congress intended the designation for hostile foreign entities).
And why SCR for Anthropic? Because, as both Hegseth and Trump inveighed, it would be intolerable for the U.S. armed forces engaged in battlefield operations to be subject to the whims of tech executives providing vital services. Anthropic had imposed contractual restrictions that barred the Pentagon from using the military version of Claude for both autonomous operation of weapons and mass domestic surveillance. Although the government had agreed to these terms when it started using Claude in 2024, the Trump administration insisted that Anthropic void them because, it asserted, military decisions related to U.S. capabilities must be made by government officials responsible for the national defense and accountable to the American people (who elect the president). So dedicated to this proposition are the president, the secretary, the intelligence services, and the Justice Department that the administration is still fighting Anthropic in federal courts in Northern California and Washington, D.C.
The Starshield controversy presents the same situation. The implication that the administration would cede decision-making about how technology is deployed on the battlefield to Musk, an unelected tech executive, is ridiculous — to say nothing of the fact that it would undermine the government’s defense of the SCR designation in the Anthropic litigation.
Even the Wall Street Journal news report that Musk gave the order qualifies this assertion as follows:
Some U.S. officials say that Musk acted unilaterally and that Trump didn’t specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. But a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses. [Emphasis added.]
And as I’ve previously related, Reuters reported, based on unidentified government sources, that the order to restrict Starshield speeds came from the White House. Furthermore, after Russia massively attacked Ukrainian civilian infrastructure while the Starshield defenses were restricted, Musk himself posted the following on X: “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”
This has become a scandal in the closing weeks before Election Day, with midterm voting already underway. With all the subtlety of a thunderclap, then, administration officials are trying to shift the blame onto Musk by framing the imposition of restrictions as a case of Musk acting unilaterally because Ukraine violated the contractual “terms of use,” as Hegseth has started putting it. Of course, Musk is close to the president, and to Hegseth, who previously got in hot water for allegedly inviting Musk to a classified China briefing, and more recently named Musk to a panel on the future of warfare. Clearly, they’d like to suggest that Musk was justified, but simultaneously claim that Musk, not the government, made the call.
But the story is absurd. Ukraine is not Musk’s Starshield client; the U.S. government is. Hegseth has spent months making it crystal clear that the U.S. government will not accept “terms of use” limitations on technology with battlefield and intelligence implications. And Musk’s own comments make the obvious explicit: Military officials and, ultimately, the commander in chief make decisions about Starshield.
I would suggest a different way to think about this. To repeat what I’ve recounted before, the Starshield restrictions were imposed at the very time that Trump was pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to surrender on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s terms. To bend his will, the administration was threatening actions that would invite barbaric Russian attacks on Ukrainian forces and civilians — the denial to Ukraine of intelligence about Russian aerial attacks (among other things), and Hegseth’s refusal to sign off on previously agreed-to and paid-for defense weapons Ukraine needs to intercept Russian missiles and drones. That is, the restriction of Starshield was perfectly harmonious with the rest of Trump’s hostile posture toward Ukraine.
Moreover, Trump has been communicating with Putin directly, and there are continuing communications between Trump’s emissaries and Putin’s subordinates. Bearing that in mind, there comes this intriguing tidbit in a report by the Institute for the Study of War regarding the Starshield restrictions:
Data from Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) between July 1, 2026, and October 19, 2026, indicates that the Starshield in-motion speed restriction, which Ukrainian forces first reported on October 14, has significantly degraded Ukraine’s intermediate-range strike campaign targeting primarily Russian logistics across the frontline. [Emphasis added.]
Starshield capabilities have enabled the operation of Ukraine’s high-speed drones, which have been paralyzing Russian logistics, grinding Moscow’s offensive ground operations to a halt, including in Donbas, the eastern region that Putin covets. Russia didn’t need an ISW report to know that the Starshield-enabled capabilities were undermining its offensive. And somehow, just when the restrictions went into effect, Russia happened to launch a major attack, killing dozens, wrecking energy infrastructure, and leaving over 600,000 Ukrainians without power, as our editorial today notes.
I’m hypothesizing here, to be sure, but I’d bet the idea to restrict Starshield speeds originated from Russia, not the White House or Musk. Russia had the greatest knowledge of how these capabilities were hurting its combat operations, it had the highest incentive to seek this accommodation, and it has the ear and the sympathies of the president of the United States.