Musk is an absolute sociopath, but there’s actually a logic to this.
Apparently the US has extremely tight export controls for telecomm tech used for war, and Starlink was concerned that by Ukraine using it in an offensive way it would result in the US or other countries classifying Starlink as military tech, thereby limiting where they can export it. That would be really bad for Starlink, of course, which is why they specified at the beginning that Ukraine should only use it for civilian goals (hospitals, schools, government, etc).
I assume the contract between Starlink and the Pentagon covers that, but I haven’t researched that far.
What you’re describing could not be done in an unbiased way. For example, you’re hinging everything on the distinction between whether something is offensive or not, but whoever decides that is in fact making a political and military decision.
Starlink had the option to decline the customer on the whole. We don’t want to let them off the hook because they intentionally created a situation where they had and used the power to affect individual battles in real time.
Musk is an absolute sociopath, but there’s actually a logic to this.
Apparently the US has extremely tight export controls for telecomm tech used for war, and Starlink was concerned that by Ukraine using it in an offensive way it would result in the US or other countries classifying Starlink as military tech, thereby limiting where they can export it. That would be really bad for Starlink, of course, which is why they specified at the beginning that Ukraine should only use it for civilian goals (hospitals, schools, government, etc).
I assume the contract between Starlink and the Pentagon covers that, but I haven’t researched that far.
What you’re describing could not be done in an unbiased way. For example, you’re hinging everything on the distinction between whether something is offensive or not, but whoever decides that is in fact making a political and military decision.
Starlink had the option to decline the customer on the whole. We don’t want to let them off the hook because they intentionally created a situation where they had and used the power to affect individual battles in real time.