Nine senators want the Pentagon’s watchdog to explain how American personnel ended up unable to reach bunkers during Russian air raids because their satellite links had been throttled. Senators Thom Tillis and Jeanne Shaheen, who co-chair the Senate NATO Observer Group, led the letter to Defense Department Inspector General Platte Moring III, asking whether decisions by the Pentagon or its contractors caused the disruption.
The letter, dated this week, follows reporting that speed restrictions hit Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade service, between October 12 and 14. Ukrainian drone and aircraft units canceled missions. Senators also cited glitches that degraded intelligence sharing and early missile warning.
A question of who gave the order
Responsibility is contested. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk wrote on X that any changes to Starshield came from U.S. government decisions. Reporting has pointed to an order originating inside the White House, which the president has denied. That contradiction is what the senators want examined, along with the Space Force’s contractual oversight of the service.
The signatories are Dick Durbin, Susan Collins, Jack Reed, John Cornyn, Chris Coons, Lisa Murkowski and Richard Blumenthal, alongside Tillis and Shaheen. Separately, four Democratic senators wrote to SpaceX’s legal vice president demanding the company explain its own role.
Why the paperwork matters more than the outage
Starshield is bought for American users but flown by a private operator under terms the public cannot read. If bandwidth can be narrowed by an order nobody will confirm, the guarantee governments assume they are buying is contractual language, not an engineering property.
The Pentagon has not said whether Moring will open a formal investigation. For allies buying American constellations, and for European officials now arguing that rented capacity cannot be trusted in a crisis, the answer will be read as a precedent.
