OPINION — This spring, a delegation from the U.S. House of Representatives visited Taiwan – both as a show of solidarity and to develop responses to Beijing’s aggression. Among their “constructive takeaways” was the need to bring Starlink, a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, to the island.
There’s a clear logic behind this idea: The LEO satellite constellation has been heralded as core to the resilience of both Ukraine’s military forces and national critical infrastructure, in their battle with Russian invaders. It stands to reason that Taiwan would want the same network ready should the People’s Liberation Army seek to claim the island by force. Unfortunately, Beijing is not Moscow. The Chinese Communist Party is prepared to neutralize systems like Starlink.
US policy makers who want to deter Chinese aggression – and, deterrence failing, prepare for the worst-case scenario of kinetic conflict over the island – would do well to adjust for the differences between China and Russia, and historical US adversaries more broadly. That means thinking beyond Starlink.
China’s operational concepts for warfighting aim to reduce U.S. advantages and exploit U.S. vulnerabilities. Key to that is prioritizing the competition for information. Space, along with cyber, is a major emphasis in this effort: Beijing’s 2007 anti-satellite test reflects as much. China’s operational concepts are also designed to neuter and ultimately defeat the United States. China knows how the US military is equipped to fight, including the reliance it has developed on space based systems – and how the United States is prepared to arm and operate alongside allies and partners. And China has invested heavily over the past half-century to build a force that targets, asymmetrically, vulnerabilities in the American way of war.
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New commercial players in space, like Starlink, are playing a growing role in the US defense industrial base. This tends to be seen as a competitive edge for the United States, permitting new degrees of innovation and dynamism. But Beijing has not been taken by surprise. Rather, China has positioned asymmetrically to take advantage of this trend.
In 2015, the CCP elevated “military-civil fusion” to the heights of national strategy. Far from empty rhetoric, this strategy directs government investment, including military spending, to develop positions of coercive leverage in commercial systems and supply chains with military utility.
Starlink is precisely the sort of player the Chinese approach targets. The primary printed circuit board supplier for Starlink is a Chinese company – as are key radio frequency chip suppliers, radio frequency receiving module suppliers, and the only low temperature solder paste supplier certified for use in SpaceX-produced base stations.
These dependencies on China inject vulnerabilities into SpaceX and therefore Starlink operations. They also tie its decisions, as a commercial player, to Beijing: Should the CCP seek to signal to SpaceX discontent for Taiwan plans, it would be expected to pull on its supply chain levers, therefore subtly and opaquely incentivizing the commercial player not to support a US ally’s defense. (Already, Musk has acknowledged that Beijing has requested he not sell Starlink in China. And he hasn’t.)
Compounding the problem: Taiwan isn’t Ukraine. The PLA has optimized its force structure and supporting architectures for dominating the near seas electromagnetic spectrum, having redundancy in firepower, and achieving over-match in contesting the Taiwan Strait. Moreover, Chinese observers suggest that the technical requirements for relevant orbits of a Taiwan Starlink will demand more launch capacity than the Ukraine example. And Taiwan has no launch capacity. That will place SpaceX in a difficult position: From China’s perspective, SpaceX support may well be non-problematic for weather satellites and scientific research satellites. But shifting into launch support for anything that could serve military purposes opposed to the CCP’s interests will be treated "completely different."
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Deterring China will require more. China holds trump cards that Starlink plays into in terms of supply chain leverage, cyber capabilities, and the operational value of homefield advantage. Defeating China operationally will require new C2 constructs. It will also require contributions from both incumbent and new industrial base contributors without outsized dependencies on China.
Starlink isn’t a silver bullet. If anything, it’s a knife for what is, best case scenario, a gun fight (and probably more of a missile fight). Worse yet, its supply chain dependencies make it a borrowed knife. China’s threat demands new solutions. It demands that the U.S. military and political leaders plan and resource for more than borrowed knives alone.
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