Description
The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with a cyber attack on the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence’s commercial satellite communications provider: ViaSat. The attack crippled the modems used by Ukrainian offices but left the ViaSat satellites functioning perfectly well. As Ukraine’s successful resistance and counterattack brought forward the possibility that the Zelensky government would survive, commercial provisions for the war effort were rolled out, not least with the provision of Starlink mobile broadband services to the Ukrainian Government and military. Since then, Starlink and the executive leadership of SpaceX have not avoided controversy in their apparent reticence on the use of Starlink by the Ukrainian military. Starlink itself has come under sustained electronic warfare – or radio jamming – attack from the Russians with mixed success. To much media hyperbole, this was a novel feature of the war which raised alarm for many in the space community at the militarisation of space systems and the targeting of privately owned satellites. Yet, the use of commercial space services in war are hardly new, and the targeting of commercial war assets are older still. Whilst Starlink has taken the headlines, other Western space companies have long provided services to Ukrainian state and society and may well be quietly supporting the logistics of the Ukrainian military today. This paper traces the use of commercial space systems in the Ukrainian War and places them in the larger context of the strategic thought and precedents of targeting commercial assets in warfare in space and at sea, to demonstrate the rush for supposed novelty in contemporary space security commentary that academic research must counter.
