Ask who cut the speed on the satellite network Ukraine uses to shoot down Iranian-designed Shahed drones, and you get four answers. Elon Musk says the U.S. military and the president did it. Trump says he doesn't know and will look into it. Hegseth says the Pentagon issued no directive. Ukrainian officials say SpaceX did it on its own.
The sorting of blame matters less than the fact that it is a mystery at all. A critical piece of a wartime ally's air defense can be throttled, and the President, the Defense Secretary and the company's owner cannot agree on who touched the dial. If that is not a scandal, nothing is.
The Right likes to say that private enterprise is nimbler than government. Fine. But this is what it looks like when a private firm becomes a load-bearing part of national security without any of the obligations that come with it. A defense contractor answers to contracting officers, inspectors general and Congress. A billionaire with a satellite constellation answers to his own mood. We have known this for years. In 2022, reporting indicated Musk had refused to extend Starlink coverage near Crimea during a Ukrainian operation, which he has disputed in part. The warning was there. Washington's response was to keep buying.
Let's be honest about my own side's role here. Democrats were happy to let the Pentagon rely on Musk's network when it was convenient and cheap, and they treated the dependency as a procurement detail rather than a strategic vulnerability. Building public alternatives, or at minimum writing enforceable terms that no owner could override, was the unglamorous work nobody wanted to do. Now the bill has come due, and it arrives while Musk has a close and unpredictable relationship with the man who commands the American government.
The diplomacy surrounding this is no more reassuring. Zelenskyy flies to Oslo to meet Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, a real estate developer and the President's son-in-law, who have been handed some of the most consequential negotiations in the world. Neither was confirmed by the Senate for anything. Both have business lives that make their motives hard to read. Meanwhile Trump, rather than defending an invaded democracy, finds fault with Zelenskyy's conduct of the war and announces he is ready to talk ending it with Putin and Xi. Notice who isn't in that conversation: the country being bombed.
This is a pattern of power without accountability. Foreign policy is run through personal envoys. Military capability depends on one man's company. And when something breaks, the government shrugs and says it will look into it. Ukrainians do not have the luxury of waiting for a briefing. Shahed drones cost little and arrive at night, and the people under them are counting on connectivity that a private owner may or may not choose to keep.
The remedy is not complicated. Congress should demand a clear answer, under oath if necessary, about who authorized any restriction. It should require that any commercial service the U.S. relies on for allied defense be governed by contracts that bar unilateral shutoffs. And it should fund public or allied alternatives, including European ones, so no single person holds a veto over a front line. Norway and Finland, hosting these talks, have every reason to care. Neither wants its security to depend on the temperament of a tycoon.
The lesson reaches well beyond Ukraine. When essential infrastructure is privately owned and politically entangled, accountability dissolves, and that is how a government ends up unable to say who turned off the lights. Whoever it was, the answer should not be a shrug.
