Reports that SpaceX temporarily restricted its satellite internet service for Ukraine’s armed forces have generated serious concern in Kyiv and among the country’s allies. SpaceX operates the civilian Starlink system and its lesser-known military-grade counterpart, called Starshield.

But many news stories leave an important question unanswered: what does a Starshield “slowdown” mean on the battlefield? The answer is that it does not suddenly blind the Ukrainian military or bring operations to a halt. But it does degrade one of the communications systems deeply embedded in how Ukraine fights.

In modern warfare, connectivity is not simply a support function. It often controls drones, shares intelligence, updates targets, and keeps battlefield units coordinated. Ukraine has become particularly dependent on satellite communications since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Starlink and Starshield help to provide connectivity in situations where conventional telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged, destroyed or is subjected to electronic warfare.

According to Ukrainian officials and reporting citing US and Western sources, terminals operating under the Starshield service were restricted when mounted on platforms moving faster than about 100 mph (161 km/h). The change reportedly disrupted drone operations and other military activities that rely on high-speed mobile connectivity.

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Read more: Is the US limiting Starlink in Ukraine? The consequences could be catastrophic

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To understand why that matters, consider how Ukraine uses satellite connectivity in practice. Frontline units frequently depend on satellite links to transmit video, receive intelligence and maintain communications over long distances.

Commanders commonly rely on near real-time battlefield information to coordinate operations across dispersed units. When that information flow slows, becomes intermittent, or stops altogether – as with the “speed limit” imposed on platforms moving quicker than 100 mph – the effects can quickly spread beyond the individual operator who loses connectivity.

The most immediate impact is likely to be on drones. Many Ukrainian systems lean on satellite connectivity not because drones cannot physically fly without it, but because modern operations often require continuous communication between operators and aircraft.

A reconnaissance drone may stream live video back to command centres. An interceptor drone pursuing an incoming Russian target may require rapid updates and coordination. A strike mission may depend on real-time intelligence and target confirmation.

Mission disruption

When connectivity becomes intermittent or unavailable, the missions slow down, become less accurate, and, in some cases, become impossible. Military personnel cited in media reports described missions being cancelled and connections dropping out during operations.

Even brief interruptions can matter. A drone travelling at high speed can cover a significant distance in ten or 20 seconds. During a critical manoeuvre or interception, losing communications for that long may mean losing the target or the aircraft altogether.

The restrictions may be particularly significant because Ukraine increasingly uses drones not only for long-range strikes but also for air defence. Ukrainian officials have stated that satellite-connected interceptor drones are among the tools used against Russian attack drones. Any reduction in connectivity therefore potentially affects not only offensive operations as well as the protection of cities and critical infrastructure.

A common misconception is that satellite internet is simply another communications channel that can readily be replaced. In practice, alternatives exist, but none offers the same combination of coverage, mobility and resilience.

Conventional military radios stay essential, but their range is limited. Fibre-optic networks provide excellent performance, but only where infrastructure exists and remains intact.

Microwave links require suitable terrain and installations. All can be vulnerable to disruption in wartime conditions. Satellite systems are attractive precisely because they can continue operating when much of the terrestrial communications infrastructure is under pressure.

Who ordered the slowdown?

This raises another question: if SpaceX owns the technology, how can the White House influence its use? That issue remains somewhat opaque. Reuters reported, citing US and Western officials, that the White House instructed SpaceX to slow Starshield service and passed the order through the Pentagon. The officials did not identify who made the decision. A senior US official reportedly denied that the US president Donald Trump himself ordered it directly.

Part of the explanation lies in the distinction between Starlink and Starshield. Starlink is SpaceX’s commercial broadband service. By contrast, Starshield was developed specifically for government and national security customers and operates under US government contracts.

Elon Musk has publicly argued that Starshield systems are “owned and controlled” by the US government and that limits on their use are determined by the US military and, ultimately, the president.

The precise contractual and operational arrangements are not public, and some analysts dispute the idea that SpaceX has no operational role whatsoever. Nevertheless, Starshield is fundamentally different from a consumer internet service.

When governments procure military communications systems, they generally acquire varying degrees of authority over how those systems are used. The relationship is best understood, not as the White House ordering a private technology company around, but as a government customer exercising influence over a capability integrated into national security operations.

An alternative to Starshield?

The episode also raises the question of whether Ukraine could switch to an alternative provider. The answer is: partially, but not quickly. The most frequently cited alternative is Eutelsat’s OneWeb network. This European-owned low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation already provides services in Ukraine and has previously indicated a willingness to expand its support.

However, OneWeb operates a substantially smaller constellation than Starlink and was designed primarily for enterprise and institutional connectivity rather than the mass deployment of tens of thousands of highly portable user terminals.

As a result, while OneWeb could supplement existing communications and reduce dependence on a single provider. Defence analysts generally regard it as an enhancement rather than a complete replacement for the Starlink ecosystem. Replacing Starlink is not simply a question of launching more satellites.

It would require new terminals, new contracts, new operational procedures and extensive integration with systems that have evolved around Starlink technology over several years of war.

Strikes can damage terrestrial networks, radios have range and bandwidth limits, and fixed infrastructure is vulnerable to attack. Starlink became so critical to Ukraine because it combines mobility, high bandwidth, and resilience at a scale few direct competitors can match.

The wider lesson may be strategic rather than technical. Ukraine’s military has benefited enormously from satellite connectivity, but the debate reveals the risks of dependence on a single provider, however capable.

The episode demonstrates that communications networks can become instruments of policy as well as technology. On today’s battlefield, controlling the flow of data can be almost as consequential as controlling the movement of troops.

For Ukraine, the Starshield slowdown matters not because of the loss of a single communications system, but because it reminds us that access to critical digital infrastructure can be as important, and as vulnerable, as access to weapons.

Steve Uhlig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Since Star Trek began sending its crews out to explore strange new worlds 60 years ago, the franchise has both imagined and inspired new concepts for travel across the vast distances of space.

Among the most intriguing are “wormholes”: mysterious tunnels through spacetime that connect otherwise distant places.

Star Trek always has a difficult balance to strike in making its portrayals both accessible and scientifically accurate. With wormholes, it generally favoured the former on their occasional appearances.

On screen, one end of the wormhole will often appear as a swirling vortex or tunnel. In fact, computer simulations of these theoretical space shortcuts suggest that the opening would look more like soap bubbles or crystal balls, with their surfaces showing distorted and multiplied images of whatever lies on the other side.

You could fly all around this opening and enter it from any direction, and rather than reaching the centre of the bubble, you would emerge from another similar bubble (the other end of the wormhole) somewhere totally different.

Of course, the most important question for both Starfleet captains and theoretical physicists is: should you fly into a wormhole? The job of a starship captain may be to boldly go, but as a very risk-averse physicist, I’m not so sure.

The first Star Trek wormhole

“Wormhole distortion has overloaded the main power systems!” These words, spoken by Commander Willard Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), marked the first appearance of a wormhole in Star Trek.

A warp drive malfunction leads to the creation of a distorted region of spacetime that sucks in the Starship Enterprise, leading to a breakdown of the ship’s systems and a potentially deadly collision with a random asteroid.

It is a typically pioneering reference to what was, at the time, a niche research topic. John Wheeler, professor of gravitational physics at Princeton University, had first coined the term with Charles Misner in their 1957 paper Classical Physics as Geometry, which aimed to describe electric charges like electrons as the ends of tunnels in space.

The first descriptions of traversable wormholes that satisfied Einstein’s equations of general relativity – configurations of matter that balance the spacetime curvature of the tunnel – were then independently published by H.G. Ellis and K. A. Bronnikov in 1973, although they didn’t use Wheeler’s moniker.

Six years later, the first Star Trek wormhole wasn’t an accurate depiction of what scientists and science fiction enthusiasts now understand by the term. For one thing, the wormhole doesn’t appear to lead anywhere, and it dissipates once the crew regain control of the ship and drop out of warp speed.

Nevertheless, as a researcher studying black holes and the early universe, I am rather fond of this scene – in part because it is actually possible to imagine warp drives (engines that bend spacetime to move the ship at faster-than-light speeds) distorting spacetime in this way.

If you put exotic matter (one with a negative pressure) into a small region of spacetime, Einstein’s equations of general relativity tell us that region can expand exponentially fast. And if the space around it is not expanding in the same way, where can all that new space go?

The answer, at least in this hypothetical scenario, is that it must balloon out into an entirely new universe, creating a wormhole in the process – a narrow passage that links the two regions.

If you’re thinking this sounds implausible, Einstein’s theory of general relativity is actually perfectly ok with things being larger on the inside. Indeed, such scenarios may (speculatively) have arisen from rare fluctuations in the early universe.

No slow-mo

Star Trek’s first depiction of a wormhole gets one aspect precisely wrong, though. In the film, the wormhole’s “temporal distortion” makes the crew move and speak in slow motion, struggling to fire the photon torpedoes that will save them from asteroid-impact obliteration.

While the gravitational time dilation predicted by Einstein could be a feature of wormhole spacetimes, it would not be experienced as slow motion by those who fly in. For them, time would pass completely normally, with their watch ticking at one second per second.

They might, however, emerge to find that their friends had aged far more than they had. But these friends wouldn’t have experienced time in fast-forward either. Both sides think time has passed normally, they just disagree about the amount.

Again, this seems like it shouldn’t really be allowed – but the same effect is experienced by clocks on GPS satellites put into orbit around the Earth. When brought back to Earth again, they are found to have experienced more time than an equivalent clock left on the Earth’s surface, due to having spent time in a weaker gravitational field.

Next Generation wormholes

By the late 1980s, Star Trek wormholes had achieved the ultimate sign of technological maturity – somebody was trying to sell one.

This depiction, in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), more closely resembled the traversable wormhole framework co-developed by Kip Thorne in 1988. The US astrophysicist and future Nobel laureate had begun exploring the theoretical requirements for the existence of wormholes as portals connecting distant regions of space in the same universe.

Thorne showed that for a wormhole to be held open in a way that makes it traversable would require an exotic form of matter, violating certain energy conditions that physicists think ought to be respected at large scales.

As the Next Generation crew find out, you don’t just want to buy any old traversable wormhole – you need it to be a stable one. The original Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole uses the right kind of exotic matter as scaffolding to hold it open. But even tiny disturbances will cause it to rapidly collapse – as has been demonstrated in many numerical simulations.

A spinning version of the Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole appears potentially more robust, but its so-called “nonlinear stability” is yet to be established. Flying a starship through one of these would be a useful, if rather risky, test.

The space between what is mathematically possible and physically realistic has always been a key part of the magic of Star Trek, inspiring several generations of scientists to explore strange new spacetimes. But if a soap-bubble wormhole ever appears in front of my spacecraft, I would always let Starfleet go first.

Katy Clough receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Simons Foundation. She will be speaking at the Star Trek Lates event at the Science Museum in London on Tuesday, September 8.

Government experts are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to work towards a possible negotiating mandate on autonomous weapons systems (AWS). These are military systems that can select and engage targets without human intervention.

This major international gathering follows a recent call by the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for urgent controls on these weapons, sometimes dubbed “killer robots” in descriptions by the media.

Recent events in Ukraine have further consolidated concerns that a slide towards weapons with full autonomy (and without meaningful human control) is well underway. According to the New York Times, a Russian drone attacked a petrol station in Zaporizhzhia on July 6, killing three civilians. What marked it out was the drone’s use of AI to decide where and when to strike.

The drone aircraft had been programmed to fly towards the petrol station. But on its approach, an AI system autonomously chose the precise target – probably propane tanks – based on its ability to recognise them.

On August 25, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the ICRC, and António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, issued their joint appeal to the international community to agree on legally binding rules regulating the development and use of AWS.

New technologies are making it cheaper and easier for nations to put together these weapons. Thus, the UN and ICRC appeal for binding rules could not be more urgent. The international community is ideally placed to start negotiations soon, building on many years of diplomatic talks.

For the past decade, governments have debated how AWS challenge existing international law and what should be done under the auspices of the convention on certain conventional weapons, a UN arms control framework. Since 2017, the group of governmental experts (GGE) on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) – which is part of the convention on certain conventional weapons – has convened typically twice a year.

The experts are meeting again this week in Geneva. The aim is to agree a governance framework and language for a rolling text that could be the foundation for negotiations. This text provides a baseline for continued discussions in November.

While this process has been rife with political disagreements, most experts agree on the need to retain some level of meaningful human control over the use of autonomous systems.

Moral significance

This demonstrates a shared sense by states participating in the process that human judgment is pivotal for the laws governing warfare. It also shows that the moral significance of warfare underlines the importance of human responsibility.

Human judgment is also embedded in international humanitarian law. Targeting processes require context-specific judgments about the targets themselves, potential harm to civilians from striking the target and other precautions. These tasks cannot be delegated to machines.

AI-enabled systems show how technology already shapes human perceptions of targets and risk. With autonomous weapons, the system shifts from influencing human judgement to exercising the targeting function itself.

Any AI system is only as good as the data it has been trained on, or that it works with. For armed conflicts, this data is difficult to come by and is almost always insufficient for dynamic and variable human contexts. This means many systems are likely to be technically inadequate.

The problem becomes quite visible with rules around assessing proportionality, for example, which is a context specific judgement about anticipated civilian harm versus military advantage.

Militaries may try to quantify targeting decisions in a way that creates the appearance of precision. However, the underlying legal judgment remains qualitative regardless. Technical accuracy, therefore, is not the same as lawfulness or moral consideration.

Only humans can understand the significance of respecting the inherent rights and dignity of other humans. Decisions to end human life must therefore be made qualitatively, by humans, in order to be morally and legally justifiable. Without this provision, and clear guidelines around it, we argue that governments risk running into a legal vacuum and a steep moral abyss.

AWS, especially those that prioritise speed and scale of action though AI, carry a significant risk of enabling an uncontrolled and rapid escalation. Escalation from crisis to war, or from conflict to a higher level of violence, could come about by erroneous indications of attack or by a simple sensor or computer error.

Unpredictable systems could give leaders false impressions of the capabilities of those systems. This could lead to overconfidence or encourage preemptive attacks.

Inevitable outcome?

One argument raised by academic researchers in the context of AWS is that they become necessary because they are inevitable. The risk is that more countries opt for full autonomy as components become cheaper and readily available, exacerbating an arms race.

However, an adversary’s conduct does not release a state from its own obligations under international humanitarian law. Following those rules is also part of what makes military force legitimate, including through civilian protection, precautions and accountability. We might turn the argument around and say: legally binding rules become inevitable, because they are absolutely necessary.

Governments and advocacy groups have worked hard over the past decade to put together a lucid proposal for the regulation of AWS. Some efforts are intended to prohibit those systems that target humans directly, or that are unpredictable and therefore cannot be meaningfully controlled by a human. All other AWS must be strictly regulated.

There are signs of political momentum. In November 2025, 156 states voted in favour of a UN General Assembly resolution that “draws attention to the serious challenges and concerns” that autonomous weapons raise. A legally binding instrument is possible, even if some states resist it.

The time is now. Clear, binding rules would help ensure that increasingly autonomous warfare does not make violence easier to unleash and harder to control.

Elke Schwarz is Vice-Chair for the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.

Jessica Dorsey is affiliated with Airwars as a member of the Executive Board and a member of the Advisory Board of the Atlantische Commissie.