As Europe reduces its security dependence on the United States, the British military has expanded its use of Elon Musk's SpaceX satellite communications network.
On the 10th, local time, Reuters said the U.K. Ministry of National Defense currently has about 1,000 terminals for Starshield, a satellite communications service for military and intelligence missions, and about 500 Starlink terminals.
The government is understood to have spent about 13 million pounds ($17.6 million, 23.6626 billion won) on Starshield, including terminal purchases and communications fees, and 16.5 million pounds ($22.295635 million, 30.0333 billion won) on Starlink. Combined, the two services amount to about $40 million (53.892 billion won).
The U.K. is the first country, excluding the United States, to officially acknowledge adopting Starshield. The British military began using Starlink in mid-2022 and, from 2024, used the Starshield communications service with existing Starlink terminals. Last year, it purchased dedicated Starshield terminals for the first time. Recently, it has been shifting communications used in actual military operations to Starshield.
Starshield is a satellite communications service that SpaceX provides to governments and military and intelligence agencies. It uses the same satellites and ground infrastructure as Starlink, which targets general consumers and corporations, but operates through dedicated terminals and a separate ground network.
SpaceX policy appears to have influenced the British military's expanded adoption of Starshield. As SpaceX limited Starlink use by the military to purposes such as troop welfare, leisure and training, Starshield became necessary for actual military operations.
Starshield is also much more expensive than Starlink. In the U.K., the Starshield plan that provides 5 terabytes (TB) of data costs 5,500 pounds (10 million won) per month, and the unlimited plan costs 25,000 pounds (45.52 million won) per month. By comparison, Starlink's corporations global data 2TB plan costs 1,830 pounds (3.33 million won) per month, a large price gap.
Dedicated Starshield terminals also cost 4,000 to 7,000 pounds (7.28 million to 12.74 million won) each, at least twice the public sale price of Starlink's corporations terminals.
The U.K.'s move runs counter to Europe's trend of reducing security dependence on the United States. As uncertainty grows over whether U.S. involvement in European security will continue in the long term, European countries are accelerating efforts to strengthen their own defense capabilities.
The U.K. has its own military satellite communications network, Skynet. It is also a shareholder in France's Eutelsat, the only operator besides Starlink of a large-scale low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband satellite network.
However, Eutelsat's OneWeb still lags significantly behind SpaceX. OneWeb operates about 600 satellites, while Starlink has more than 10,000. The European Union's Iris2, a multi-orbit satellite communications initiative aimed at securing digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy, also needs time before actual service.
The U.K. Ministry of National Defense explained its use of Starshield by saying it "provides enhanced encryption, military-only terms of use and high network priority."