“Being able to connect with friends and family gives sailors a few minutes to relax and therefore be more efficient,” says Richard Hanninger. Ford“This isn’t just the ability to stay in touch with friends and family, pay bills online, take online classes, or even just check the score on a game,” a deployed resilience educator from the Navy said after installing the SEA2 system on the carrier in February 2023. “All of this gives Sailors access to things that lower their stress levels so they can come back to work after a short break more focused and ready to execute their mission.”
But beyond morale-boosting applications, SEA2 is said to also provide significant benefits to “tactical and business applications” used daily by Sailors, such as maintaining their air wing or tracking pay and benefits. As White explained in the Navy’s May announcement about the initiative, most of these applications operate at higher levels of secrecy and are encrypted, but are still designed to run on the commercial internet without compromising information security.
“The fact that we’re not taking advantage of the opportunity of modern technology to put classified tactical applications on the commercial internet is something we’re missing out on, so we’ve built (SEA2) to be able to do that in the future,” White said. “We’re close to demonstrating some of those applications, and we believe it will be a game changer.” (As of June, the Navy had not approved the use of classified data on the system.)
The Navy also expects widespread deployment of SEA2 across the surface fleet to have a wide range of “tangible warfighting impacts,” including “recruitment and retention, mental health, cloud services and work stoppages due to slow or inaccessible websites,” a Navy official told DefenseScoop in April.
The Navy isn’t the only military adopting Starlink to enable fast, persistent internet for deployed service members. The U.S. Space Force signed a $70 million contract with Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, in October 2023 to provide “best-effort global subscriptions for a range of land, maritime, fixed and mobile platforms and users” using StarShield, the name of the company’s military product. The U.S. Army still relies on Starlink, but according to Defense News, the service is looking for new commercial constellations of satellites that can be leveraged for advanced command and control functions. SpaceX is also 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 when it comes to potential military applications. According to a technical report obtained by The Debrief, Ukraine claims that Russian military intelligence conducted a “major cyberattack” to access data from the Starlink constellation, which has proven vital to Ukraine’s military communications infrastructure since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. Indeed, as WIRED previously reported, critical hardware vulnerabilities have left Starlink terminals at risk in the hands of experienced hackers.
More importantly, Musk’s ownership of Starlink matters: The controversial SpaceX founder previously vetoed Ukraine’s use of the satellite constellation to launch a surprise attack against Russian forces in Kremlin-controlled Crimea in September 2022, raising concerns among Pentagon decision-makers that civilians with questionable geopolitical perceptions could significantly dictate U.S. military operations in a future conflict by simply turning off each service’s access to Starlink, The Associated Press reported last year.
“We live in a world where Elon runs this company, it’s a private company that he controls, and we live off his goodwill,” a Pentagon official told The New Yorker in August 2023. “It sucks.”
Given these potential risks, it’s unlikely that Starlink will ever be integrated more deeply into the core tactical systems that control Navy warships’ operations at sea. But for now, at least it seems like sailors will get a welcome respite from the stresses and loneliness of life on the high seas.