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Elon Musk's Shadow Rule
tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.
By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).
Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.
If Musk had simply gone to the DoD and told them that his company couldn't afford to keep providing this service free of charge, he probably could have reached a deal similar to the one he got much earlier. Instead, he started messing around with the service itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.
I sit on the board of a nonprofit that relies heavily on volunteers. While I don't expect these volunteers to have the kind of dedication an employee would, nothing irritates me more than when someone volunteers to do something and then doesn't do it. No, you're under no obligation to help me. But keep in mind that if you tell me you're going to come and then don't show up it complicates things because now I have to rearrange my plans on the fly, and your absence may be the difference between finishing the job in one day and having to dedicate more time. If I know this in advance I can work around it, but I don't like surprises. Even worse is when a vendor reneges on a deal. Yes, I'm grateful that you're providing goods or services for free or at a reduced price, but when you change the terms a week before the event I either have to come up with money that's not in the budget or find someone else on short notice. It's probably not the best analogy, but the point is that just because you're doing something nice at your own expense doesn't mean people don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed if they get cut off before they've accomplished the goal you're ostensibly helping them with.
That's BS. What he messed around with was disabling starlink use for drone guidance.
The deal was comms for units, not that they're going to use these starlinks to operate drones remotely.
That feels like quite the arbitrary distinction, why would someone be ok with providing the infrastructure to coordinate more effectively and call in artillery, but not be ok with using it to guide drones?
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but this sounds like a restriction put in place by someone who doesn't really understand warfare.
It's the condition SpaceX set at the outset. And I doubt it's critical in calling in artillery, you only need ~30 km range there. Odds are whoever's flying drones is using spread spectrum radio to contact the battery, which is necessarily close to the observed area.
It's possible it's related to some bullshit in 'laws of war' which e.g. make it okay to shoot a civilian in the act of snitching on you to the enemy, but make it illegal to execute him after the act.
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