The Starshield Whodunit

As if there’s not enough bad news going around, the latest fiasco from the Trump administration involves the apparently deliberate outage of the Starshield system that assists the defense of Ukraine from Russia’s war. This is, rightly, a major national security scandal. Politically, it also undercuts the administration’s effort to defend the unpopular war with Iran by arguing that, hey, at least you’re paying for us to be the serious grownups on national security. Whatever this is, it’s neither responsible behavior nor good domestic politics, which is why nobody is claiming responsibility.

To briefly summarize a story that has been covered in more depth by my colleagues Noah Rothman and Andy McCarthy, Starshield is a companion product of the Starlink satellite internet service, provided by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX to the Pentagon, which gives access to Starshield to the Ukrainian government. It provides the internet age’s equivalent of radar surveillance capabilities, which are useful to the Ukrainian war effort both in defending Ukrainian military and civilian targets from Russia, and in targeting Russian assets for Ukraine’s offensive actions. It can be particularly useful in detecting incoming aerial assaults.

You will note the ironic tension: Donald Trump and his second-term administration (most conspicuously Vice President JD Vance and his allies in Defense Department posts) are profoundly hostile to the Ukrainian war effort. So is Elon Musk. And yet, Trump and Musk between them have provided advanced technology, weapons, and funding that are absolutely essential to the survival of that war effort and, thereby, the survival of Ukraine as a sovereign nation. They have done so to accommodate a variety of important interests, which include U.S popular opinion, laws passed by Congress, the demands and contributions to the cause of U.S. allies in Europe, and (in the case of Musk) contractual agreements with the Pentagon. It may seem quaint, but American presidents are supposed to execute the law, even in foreign affairs.

I will refer throughout this column to the Defense Department, not its current nom de guerre as the War Department. That’s partly because it’s still the Department of Defense in American law, and partly (while I prefer the historical nomenclature of the War Department) because it has not at any point in this controversy acted as a department of war.

Last week, Starshield went down for Ukraine for about 72 hours, with devastating consequences. As Andy notes, “while the system was compromised, Putin’s forces conducted some of the most intensive aerial attacks against Ukrainian territory since the war began, firing 39 ballistic missiles and 128 Shahed drones, mainly at the greater Kyiv and Kharkiv areas. At least nine civilians were killed, and many others wounded. Volodymyr Zelensky says 26 power facilities and four oil and gas facilities were damaged. More than 600,000 people lost power, for the most part, in the capital.” Zelensky is predictably, and openly, incensed. If this was done on purpose by the executive branch of the United States government, to an ally reliant upon us and without advanced warning, it was — as Noah observes — “a moral and strategic atrocity.”

There has been surprisingly little effort put into denying that this happened or constructing any counternarrative of how it could have resulted from inadvertence, accident, or incompetence. Musk, for his part, says that the system is provided to DoD, that he did nothing to breach his contract to keep it operational, and that any outage must have been a DoD decision (whether or not it was handed down to DoD from the White House). Secretary of State Marco Rubio insists that it cannot have been “deliberate”: “It sort of happened.” But he also pointedly described it as “a defense product,” not something run by his department. Some unnamed sources, possibly at the Pentagon, point the finger at the White House. Nobody else is rushing to go on the record.

So, whodunit? That question may consume us for some time.

Musk, as the man who runs SpaceX and who has been a fierce critic of the Ukrainian government, must be considered a suspect. And given his large-dollar contract with the Pentagon to provide this service, his denials are self-interested. But he seems an unlikely suspect. It would be unlike Musk to sandbag a contractual business partner in a way that would be easy to prove in court, costing him a very valuable government contract. Musk may be an eccentric figure and an unreliable source of political news, but he didn’t get to be a trillionaire or something close to it by doing things that cut sharply against his own economic interests.

Assuming Musk is telling the truth (never a given, but consistent with his interests), and that we’re not dealing simply with government incompetence, that raises the question of what might have motivated people in our government to do this. The motive and the suspects are likely to suggest one another. Four are possible.

The first is ideology. Americans hostile to the Ukrainian war effort might have decided to take matters into their own hands in the interests of bringing the war to a swifter conclusion more favorable to Russia.

The second is politics. Republican political fortunes are being harmed by high energy prices resulting in part from the wars in Iran and Ukraine interrupting supplies of oil for gasoline, diesel fuel, and home heating oil. Volodymyr Zelensky’s warfighting strategy relies on hitting Russian fossil fuel production, while his country is not much of an energy exporter. So Zelensky chafed when the U.S. tried (for reasons nakedly motivated by the midterm elections) to get him to agree to a short-term cease-fire against energy infrastructure, which Putin predictably violated even though it was one-sidedly in his favor. Trump has denounced Zelensky for giving up on the cease-fire. The Starshield breach could be U.S. retribution for hurting Trump and his party politically.

The third possible motive is statecraft. I regard this as very poor statecraft, but Trump and his administration may genuinely have convinced themselves that imposing more pain on both sides of this conflict is the only way to compel a peace that will be unpopular enough at home in both countries to cost Zelensky and/or Putin their jobs and/or their lives. In this view of things, the combatants knowing that the pain is coming from the Oval Office is a plus.

The fourth and most spectacular possible motive is treason: Somebody acted to benefit the interests of Russia, and (if you buy this theory or, perhaps, the third one) alerted Russia as well in order to maximize the immediate pain to the Zelensky government. I regard this as an unsatisfyingly unlikely answer because it is apt to leave a paper trail, and an implausible one if applied to Trump, Vance, Pete Hegseth, or other very senior officials. But while the absence of evidence suggests caution in throwing around such incendiary possibilities, history cautions us against entirely discounting Russian intelligence’s capacity to locate and activate traitors in the West. If so, it’s most likely to be someone barely known to the wider public.

If the decision came from the Trump White House, either at the direction of the president or of his political operatives, it is likeliest that it was done for reasons of politics, statecraft, or some murky and self-convinced combination of the two. If it was Trump, he probably believed that this sort of bloody hardball is the “Art of the Deal” necessary to bring the war to an end, while desiring lower diesel prices but telling himself that’s not all he’s doing. By contrast, it’s hard to picture very many political aides in this White House feeling independent enough to give this sort of order to DoD without the president’s approval.

If the decision came from DoD without the signoff of the White House, it is likelier to have been ideological in nature, which would make the Vance allies in DoD the logical people to start with. Could it have come from Vance himself? While I put nothing past Vance in terms of his animosity toward Ukraine and its cause (like Obama with the Iraq War, he’s now so dug into opposition to the Ukrainian cause as a keystone of his political identity that he’d be humiliated if Ukraine ended the war on relatively successful terms), I have a hard time picturing him being so personally imprudent as to make this big of a national security decision on his own in a way that risks alienating Trump — the one man who could kill his political career in a single tweet. But some of the true believers in policy jobs might be another matter.

Of course, a traitor — or a Ukrainian hawk trying to ratf*** the administration — can’t be ruled out. But the latter seems a highly speculative bank shot, and the former is bound to be someone identifiable only by patient federal investigation. The same goes for whether someone actually alerted the Russians.

There is also the question, as happens with executive branch scandals, of whether we will find out whodunit, or whether someone who carried out an order will fall on their sword to take responsibility and protect the higher-ups. That didn’t happen in the Nixon years, although it arguably is a fairer description of how some Reagan, Clinton, and Obama era scandals ended. While some of Trump’s personal business associates have shown him great loyalty at cost to themselves in criminal investigations, I’m doubtful that we will see something like that from Trump political underlings. Vance may inspire that particular sort of ideological loyalty, but not Trump. If anybody takes a spear for him, it’s likelier to be in expectation of a pardon.

In any event, simple stonewalling seems unlikely to work, and we will all be better off with answers rather than rank speculation. Democrats are all but certain to win at least the House, allowing them to launch investigations with teeth. Republican lawmakers are alarmed. A bipartisan group of nine senators (albeit with the four Republicans being mavericks Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and embittered retirees John Cornyn and Thom Tillis) have called for an investigation. Pretending that this is going away will not be an option.