“Having the ability to reach out to friends or family allows our sailors the opportunity to decompress for a few minutes, and that in turn allows them to be able to operate more efficiently,” Richard Haninger, the Ford’s deployed resiliency educator, said following the installation of the SEA2 system aboard the carrier in February 2023. “It’s not just about reaching back to friends and family, the ability to pay a bill online, take an online class, or even just check the score of the game […] all of this allows our Sailors the chance to access something that lowers their stress level, then return to work after a quick break more focused and able to complete the mission.”
But beyond morale-boosting applications, SEA2 also purportedly offers major benefits for “tactical and business applications” used by sailors on a daily basis, like, say, those used for air wing maintenance or for tracking pay and benefits. As White explained in a May release from the Navy on the initiative, most of these applications function at higher classification levels and are encrypted, but they’re still designed to operate on the commercial internet without jeopardizing information security.
“The fact that we’re not making use of that opportunity with modern technology to allow classified tactical applications to ride the commercial internet is where we are missing out, so we built [SEA2] to be able to do that in the future,” as White put it. “We’re close to demonstrating a couple of those applications, and I am fully confident it will be game changing.” (As of June, the Navy had not authorized the use of classified data with the system)
The Navy also expects to see broad “tangible warfighting impact” from the proliferation of SEA2 across the surface fleet, namely on “recruitment and retention, mental health, cloud services, and work stoppages due to slow and inaccessible websites,” as one service official told DefenseScoop in April.
The Navy isn’t the only service embracing Starlink to enable faster, persistent internet for deployed service members. The US Space Force signed a $70 million contract with Starlink parent company SpaceX in October 2023 to provide “a best effort and global subscription for various land, maritime, stationary and mobility platforms and users” using Starshield, the company’s name for its military products. The US Army currently remains reliant on Starlink, but the service has been casting about for fresh commercial satellite constellations to tap into for advanced command and control functions, according to Defense News. And SpaceX is 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 for potential military applications. According to a technical report obtained by The Debrief, Ukraine has claimed that Russia’s military intelligence agency has conducted “large-scale cyberattacks” to access data from the Starlink satellite constellations that have proven essential to the former’s military communications infrastructure since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. Indeed, significant hardware vulnerabilities have imperiled Starlink terminals at the hands of experienced hackers, as WIRED has previously documented.