The US Navy Is Going All In on Starlink

Life aboard a US Navy warship at sea can be stressful, boring, and lonely, with separation from friends and family and long stretches between port calls both isolating and monotonous. Now, Elon Musk is here to take the edge off.

In a now deleted press release from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR), the Navy recently announced that it is experimenting with bringing reliable and persistent high-speed internet to its surface warships. The connectivity comes via a new system developed under its Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore (SEA2) initiative, which uses satellites from the Starlink network maintained by Musk’s SpaceX and other spaceborne broadband internet providers to maintain a constant and consistent internet connection for sailors—a system that NAVWAR says has “applications across the entire Navy.”

The US Defense Department has for decades relied on a network of aging satellites to furnish service members at sea with decidedly slow internet access, according to an updated release NAVWAR shared with WIRED. By contrast, commercial satellite constellations like Starlink and Eutelsat OneWeb, which number in the thousands and offer coverage from a significantly lower orbit, provide a far superior connection.

The resulting SEA2 system, dubbed the Satellite Terminal (transportable) Non-Geostationary (STtNG), allows a warship’s tactical feeds secure access to low-orbit satellites with a median connection speed of 30 to 50 megabits per second, according to NAVWAR. With the installation of additional Starlink antennas, the system can scale up to speeds of 1 gigabit per second.

NAVWAR said that it scrubbed its initial press release, which showed the installation of a Starlink terminal aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, from the Pentagon’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System (DVIDS) media portal to “address inaccuracies and ensure the information is correct,” Elisha Gamboa, a command spokesperson, told WIRED in a statement.

News of the Starlink terminal’s installation aboard the Lincoln in particular came as the aircraft carrier and its associated battle group were redirected to the US Central Command area of operations in the Middle East amid increased tensions between Israel and Iran following the former’s targeted killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran.

The Navy has not yet disclosed how many surface warships have received Starlink terminals. Defense officials told DefenseScoop in April that the DOD was at the time evaluating the system aboard two deployed vessels “with aims to field those broadband-providing capabilities across a fleet of up to 200 in the future.”

Originally a “passion project” of Lincoln combat systems officer Commander Kevin White, SEA2 systems were first installed aboard the next-generation aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in February 2023, offering sailors the ability to quickly and easily communicate with loved ones back home no matter where they are in the world—a major boost to morale amid the doldrums of life at sea. The system even allowed hundreds of sailors to enjoy a live broadcast of Super Bowl LVIII through a normal TV streaming service aboard the warship this past year.

“Having the ability to reach out to friends or family allows our sailors the opportunity to decompress for a few minutes, and that in turn allows them to be able to operate more efficiently,” Richard Haninger, the Ford’s deployed resiliency educator, said following the installation of the SEA2 system aboard the carrier in February 2023. “It’s not just about reaching back to friends and family, the ability to pay a bill online, take an online class, or even just check the score of the game […] all of this allows our Sailors the chance to access something that lowers their stress level, then return to work after a quick break more focused and able to complete the mission.”

But beyond morale-boosting applications, SEA2 also purportedly offers major benefits for “tactical and business applications” used by sailors on a daily basis, like, say, those used for air wing maintenance or for tracking pay and benefits. As White explained in a May release from the Navy on the initiative, most of these applications function at higher classification levels and are encrypted, but they’re still designed to operate on the commercial internet without jeopardizing information security.

“The fact that we’re not making use of that opportunity with modern technology to allow classified tactical applications to ride the commercial internet is where we are missing out, so we built [SEA2] to be able to do that in the future,” as White put it. “We’re close to demonstrating a couple of those applications, and I am fully confident it will be game changing.” (As of June, the Navy had not authorized the use of classified data with the system)

The Navy also expects to see broad “tangible warfighting impact” from the proliferation of SEA2 across the surface fleet, namely on “recruitment and retention, mental health, cloud services, and work stoppages due to slow and inaccessible websites,” as one service official told DefenseScoop in April.

The Navy isn’t the only service embracing Starlink to enable faster, persistent internet for deployed service members. The US Space Force signed a $70 million contract with Starlink parent company SpaceX in October 2023 to provide “a best effort and global subscription for various land, maritime, stationary and mobility platforms and users” using Starshield, the company’s name for its military products. The US Army currently remains reliant on Starlink, but the service has been casting about for fresh commercial satellite constellations to tap into for advanced command and control functions, according to Defense News. And SpaceX is actively building a network of “hundreds” of specialized Starshield spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Reuters reported earlier this year.

But Starlink is far from a perfect system, especially for potential military applications. According to a technical report obtained by The Debrief, Ukraine has claimed that Russia’s military intelligence agency has conducted “large-scale cyberattacks” to access data from the Starlink satellite constellations that have proven essential to the former’s military communications infrastructure since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. Indeed, significant hardware vulnerabilities have imperiled Starlink terminals at the hands of experienced hackers, as WIRED has previously documented.

More importantly, there’s the matter of Musk’s ownership of Starlink. The controversial SpaceX founder had previously refused to allow Ukraine to use the satellite constellation to launch a surprise attack against Russian forces in Kremlin-controlled Crimea in September 2022, prompting concerns among Pentagon decisionmakers that a private citizen with a questionable perception of geopolitics could drastically shape US military operations during a future conflict simply by switching off service branches’ Starlink access, according to an Associated Press report last year.

“Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told The New Yorker in August 2023. “That sucks.”

In a post on X responding to this article following publication, Musk asserted that “Starlink was barred from turning on satellite beams in Crimea at the time, because doing so would violate US sanctions against Russia!”

“We received an unexpected request in the middle of the night to activate Starlink in Crimea in a matter of a few hours from the Ukraine government, but received no request or permission to override sanctions from the US government,” Musk added. “Had we done as Ukraine asked, it would have been a felony violation of US law.”

Musk previously said that enabling Ukraine to use Starlink to launch its attack would make SpaceX “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Given these potential risks, it’s unlikely that Starlink will see deeper integration into the major tactical systems that govern the operation of a Navy warship at sea. But for the moment, it looks as though sailors will at least get a welcome reprieve from the stress and solitude of life on the high seas.

Update 1:50 pm ET, September 3, 2024: Added comments from Elon Musk in response to this article’s characterization of Starlink’s refusal to enable its service for the Ukrainian military.