In September 2022, Ukrainian forces prepared to launch a drone strike on the Russian naval fleet anchored off Crimea. The drones never arrived.
Elon Musk had decided, unilaterally, not to activate Starlink coverage over the region. But he wasn’t simply declining to help. SpaceX had already been managing battlefield access for both sides: restricting Russian use, imposing speed limits to prevent drone integration, and maintaining a verified whitelist with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. One private citizen, with no security clearance and no accountability to any electorate, was governing the battlefield connectivity of an active war.
The public debate treats this as a story about Elon Musk — his politics, his proximity to the White House, his X posts. That framing lets the actual problem off the hook. Replace Musk with the most patriotic, internationalist, apolitical CEO imaginable and the structural problem remains identical. The Pentagon has spent a decade building critical military functions on infrastructure it can’t legally compel, and the consequences are now arriving in real time.
A common reflex is to argue that private defense contractors have always been central to American military power. Lockheed Martin builds the F-35; Raytheon builds the Patriot. What’s different now is the control plane: who has real-time administrative control during use. When the government buys a tank, it owns it. The keys don’t expire. The manufacturer can’t disable it mid-mission or impose terms in combat. Software and AI are different. Vendors keep ongoing control — updates, access, and usage limits. They don’t sell a capability; they license access to one, and the license has conditions.
Those conditions have already collided with active operations. After months of failed negotiations, the Pentagon formally designated the AI firm Anthropic a supply-chain risk because of restrictions on how its model could be used. The Pentagon was explicit in its decision: “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command.” Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, described the moment he fully grasped the vulnerability: Anthropic’s models were already embedded across combatant commands and intelligence agencies, wired into classified workflows. Anthropic retained the control plane inside the Pentagon’s cloud — able to update, restrict, or shut off access. When Michael raised hypothetical crisis scenarios, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, offered exceptions case by case. “Just call me if you need another exception,” Michael recalls him saying. In a genuine crisis, a commander can’t call a vendor to authorize military action, nor should he have to.
This isn’t about whether Anthropic’s rules are reasonable. They weren’t set by anyone accountable to the joint force, there’s no override mechanism, and the Pentagon had made itself dependent on systems it doesn’t control.
This pattern is an old one. History shows that when private actors become load bearing in sovereign functions, the state only reasserts control after catastrophe. In the 18th century, the British Parliament grew dangerously reliant on the East India Company — a private entity that fielded its own armies and conducted its own diplomacy — until a massive rebellion forced the Crown to take direct control. Closer to home, the Panic of 1907 revealed that the U.S. government lacked the institutional capacity to save its own economy without J.P. Morgan personally convening a financial rescue. Congress didn’t just want a fallback; it built the Federal Reserve to ensure the sovereign could act in a crisis without calling a private banker. That is the model we need today.
Other countries are already drawing lessons. Taiwan has begun building a sovereign satellite network the state controls end-to-end, because, as one defense researcher put it, “What if we relied on Starlink and Musk decided to cut down because of pressure from China? We have to take that into consideration.” Musk has been direct about the stakes himself. Referring to the Ukrainian military’s dependence on his Starlink infrastructure, he wrote in March 2025: “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” That is a structural condition no democratic government can or should tolerate.
The policy response must be twofold. First, every critical commercial capability used by the state must have a sovereign fallback, a government-owned or controlled alternative that functions when a vendor won’t. Second, defense contracts must include operational override clauses, ensuring that the government, not a private board, holds the final authority in a crisis. Critics will argue that such mandates will stifle innovation or drive tech companies away from government work altogether. But strategic autonomy is not a luxury. It is a requirement of sovereignty. We can enjoy the speed and brilliance of Silicon Valley innovation, but we cannot allow the kill switch for national security decisions to sit on a desk in Palo Alto.
The Crimea episode was a warning. The Anthropic dispute was a second. In both cases, the United States discovered mid-operation that it had outsourced a core sovereign function to a private actor whose interests, at that moment, diverged from the mission. In both cases, the response was to manage the immediate problem and continue the underlying relationship. At some point the next crisis won’t come with enough lead time to improvise a workaround.
Stephen Kaufman is a student at Columbia University majoring in Political Science.
