America's Wagner Group: Starlink crisis in Ukraine shows dangerous reality for US allies - opinion

On October 14, 2026, Ukraine experienced speed throttling of its connections to Starshield, Starlink’s military counterpart. The imposed strict speed ceilings restricted connections for any terminals or drones exceeding 100 miles per hour.

That grounded or disconnected Ukraine’s faster military strike and interceptor drones, which rely on communication with operators over long distances. Almost as soon as news of the newly imposed limits was disclosed by Ukrainian officials, the game of finger-pointing and shifting the blame between US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Starlink’s CEO, began.

Trump announced he had no knowledge of the decision, suggesting the initiative was wholly Musk’s. In turn, Musk claimed to have received orders from the White House. The back-and-forth continued, with both Trump and Musk denying responsibility.

It is not hard to deduce the sequence of events that led to the decision to reduce the coverage: the president and Musk had a conversation, with Trump complaining about Ukraine and how “ungrateful” it was. Musk suggested a way to teach the country a lesson by temporarily reducing Starshield’s services.

The president agreed that it would be a good idea, but suggested the White House should not be directly implicated, given the timing, a few weeks before the midterms, was very sensitive. Yet, no matter how Trump and Musk try to spin the story, the proverbial buck, as put by president Harry Truman, “stops here.”

This avoidance of responsibility is not a new feature of American politics. But the other aspect of the affair has far-reaching consequences, going beyond national borders and carrying worldwide strategic implications.

The US is a superpower possessing one of the most powerful militaries in the world. It is also the major supplier of weapons and military platforms to its allies and countries it deems friendly. Historically, the countries purchasing those weapons understood that their usage and proper maintenance depended on American political goodwill.

The president and Congress could influence or even restrict American-made weapons’ usage and deployment, and many countries have faced those limitations or the threats thereof. Yet it has always been a clear political decision. There was a clear channel of communication to discuss and agree on the matter.

The White House was the responsible party on the American side. Its decisions were politically controlled by internal politics and bilateral relationships. The rules of the game were transparent and well known. That clarity provided the clients of American weaponry a sense of stability and well-placed dependence.

But what if, in the decision to dial down Starshield’s coverage in Ukraine, Musk played a role equal to Trump’s? What if there is a new independent entity in America that can make decisions of a magnitude that, just a few months ago, only the president could?

A slippery slope of who would control Starlink technologies

Elon Musk is not bound by political considerations. His interests are completely independent of those of the president, another country, or bilateral relationships. He is an independent businessman with the power of a sovereign, deciding who wins, who loses, and who dies.

And those decisions are driven not by the art of statecraft, but by his business interests, whims, and caprices. This is not merely the problem of one particular individual, even though, in Musk’s case, that problem is huge.

The wars in Ukraine, Karabakh, and Iran showed how technology has become a decisive force on the battlefield. Those conflicts proved beyond doubt that the huge military conglomerates of yesteryear are no longer capable of providing the technical support a modern military needs to win.

The dinosaurs of old are too slow and cumbersome in a world where a fast pace of development, deployment, and refinement is a must. The American government and the US military have no choice but to rely extensively on start-ups founded by folks with very “interesting” ideas of how the world should be to supply themselves with needed platforms.

Those companies, both private and public, may, as in the case of Starlink, possess dual-use technologies.

Inevitably, the question arises: Who controls the switch? Who controls communication with those devices in the field? The question is of paramount importance because, as Musk has spectacularly displayed, someone in a land far away has the power and ability to stop a war, allow one side to win and another to lose, and effectively play god.

Every American ally in a conflict zone, be it Israel and Ukraine in active wars, Europe awaiting another Russian invasion, Taiwan awaiting China’s channel crossing, or South Korea awaiting another North Korean provocation, is shaken to the core by the Starlink fiasco.

They have all purchased billions of dollars worth of American equipment under the assumption, perhaps no longer true, that its reliability is backed by American political power.

But if that depends on the current state of mind of Musk or another brilliant founder with questionable interests and mental stability, then the US has stopped being an ally, and even a reliable source of weaponry. That means American credibility as a political and military power is lost.

If the American military industry becomes an American version of the Wagner Group, then our power is on a slippery slope to the “dustbin” of history.

The writer lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.