Satellites - Single Point of Failure

One of the worst things you can have in combat is a single point of failure;  a linchpin upon which an entire operation depends.  If it fails, you lose everything.  For example, let’s imagine a ship has several types of sensors and all are operated off electrical power that ultimately passes through a single cable.  That cable would represent a single point of failure.  Sever the cable and all the sensor systems would be rendered inoperative by a single component’s failure.  We have seen examples in industry and the military where supposedly redundant, independent systems have failed because of an unrecognized single point of failure.  In our example, we might be tempted to proudly proclaim that we have set up multiple independent sensor systems.  After all, they’re physically separated.  They use different frequencies.  They each have their own cooling systems.  Those that need motors each have their own.  Completely independent;  nothing in common ...  except for the single power cable that no one thought about and did not recognize as a single point of failure.
 
Our military is currently constructing a single point of failure on a very large scale in the form of satellite communications.  Consider the vast number of systems that all depend on satellite communications:  drones, weapons, command and control, sensors, and on and on.  If we lose satellite communications, we lose … well … a huge chunk of our entire military capability.
 
You might be tempted to argue that satellite communications are not a single point of failure because we have dozens/hundreds/thousands of satellites and no enemy could possibly eliminate all of them.  Setting aside the highly debatable nature of that assertion, think, what do all satellites have in common?  That’s right, a very small number of control/communication stations … approaching a single point of failure.  It doesn’t matter how many satellites you have if they all depend on a very few control stations.
 
Think further, what do all control stations have in common?  An even smaller number of software programs that run them.  If an enemy can hack/virus the software (we’ve seen that it’s almost impossible to prevent hacking of military or commercial networks and programs), it instantly renders all the control stations and their associated satellites useless.
 
Well, none of that could ever happen, you say.  Except that already has and we have at least one public example.
 

A global outage across Elon Musk’s satellite network ​affecting millions of Starlink users had left two dozen unmanned surface vessels bobbing off the California coast, disrupting communications and halting operations for almost an hour.
 
The incident, which involved drones ‌intended to bolster U.S. military options in a conflict with China, was one of several Navy test disruptions linked to SpaceX's Starlink that left operators unable to connect with autonomous boats, according to internal Navy documents reviewed by Reuters and a person familiar with the matter.[1]

Think even further.  What if a key individual (a single point of failure, by definition!) were to shut down or sabotage the entire satellite system, perhaps motivated by bribes/payoffs or coerced by Chinese threats against him or his family?  Couldn’t happen, you laugh?  How about this:
 

Reuters reported last year that [Elon] Musk unexpectedly switched off Starlink access to Ukrainian troops as they sought to retake territory from Russia, denting allies' trust in the billionaire.[1]

There you have a single (non-military!) individual shutting down a satellite system because he disagreed with the military and geopolitical actions.
 
Think further still.  The single point of failure doesn’t have to involve destruction of assets, cyber attacks, or rogue villains.  It could be as simple as routine mechanical/software failure.  Here’s an example.
 

In April 2025, during a series ​of Navy tests in California involving unmanned boats and flying drones, officials reported that Starlink struggled to provide a solid network connection due to the high data usage needed to control multiple systems, according to a Navy safety report of the tests reviewed by Reuters.[1]

Given the complexity of modern systems, sometimes you don’t even know why a system failed.
 

In the weeks leading up to the global Starlink outage in August, another ​series of Navy tests was disrupted by intermittent connection issues with the Starlink network, Navy documents reviewed by Reuters show. ​The causes of the network losses were not immediately clear.[1]

Now let’s close with one of the dumbest statements I’ve heard in a while, courtesy of Mr. Bryan Clark at the Hudson Institute.
 

Despite the setbacks, the upside of Starlink – a cheap and commercially available service – outweighs the risk of a potential outage disrupting future military operations, said Bryan Clark, an autonomous warfare expert at the Hudson Institute. “You ​accept those vulnerabilities because of the benefits you get from the ubiquity it provides,” he said.[1]

In peacetime you might accept the occasional failure because the downside isn’t all that serious.  It’s not life or death … just inconvenience.  In war, it most certainly is life and death and you can’t afford systems with known single points of failure and a known, not insignificant, failure rate to begin with.
 
 
Discussion
 
Given our overwhelming dependence on satellites, do you think the Chinese are going to allow us to continue to use them, unhindered?  Of course not!  They’ll attack them physically, electronically, digitally (software), and via human operator vulnerabilities.  Anyone want to bet that there aren’t Chinese agents embedded in the military or Starlink?  One way or another, I’d be very surprised if we have many operating satellites two weeks after the war starts.
 
We see that satellite communications could be disrupted in a variety of ways:  physical destruction, cyber attacks, software viruses, sabotage, and routine failure, among other methods.  Does it make sense that so much of our military, current and future, has, as its very foundation, satellite communications?  Would any sane individual purposely build a system with that many known, anticipatable vulnerabilities?  And yet we’re doing exactly that.  Worse, we’re increasing our use of, and dependence on, satellites instead of decreasing it.
 
Consider that the military, some years ago, recognized GPS as a significant vulnerability.  All of our navigation and most of our weapons depend on GPS.  GPS was recognized as a single point of failure and the military, to their slow and belated credit, has set about mitigating that dependence.  We’re now designing systems that use alternates to GPS.  We knew we couldn’t accept a single point of failure, like GPS, and yet we’re intentionally and enthusiastically embracing satellites as a single point of failure.  That’s baffling.
 
 
 
 
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[1]Reuters website, “Exclusive: Starlink outage hit drone tests, exposing Pentagon’s growing reliance on SpaceX”, David Jeans, 16-Apr-2026,
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/starlink-outage-hit-drone-tests-exposing-pentagons-growing-reliance-spacex-2026-04-16/

Satellite Imagery Dispersal

There is a significant faction of military/naval observers who have the mistaken belief that satellites can see every vessel sailing on the ocean and that the satellites have some sort of direct link to the firing controls on ships and aircraft thus rendering every ship a kill waiting to happen.  This is nonsense, as ComNavOps has repeatedly pointed out.  The resolution of satellite imagery precludes that kind of omnipotent detection and tracking.  If you have sufficient resolution then you give up breadth of field.  If you have breadth of field then you give up resolution.
 
All this is compounded by the fact that satellite imagery is in high demand and the raw image must be processed and analyzed.  After that, it has to be dispersed to the hundreds of offices wanting access to it.  In the case of fire control, you have to add in layers of command (bureaucracy) before any useful detection/tracking imagery can reach a ship or aircraft where it can be put to actual firing use. 
 
The entire process takes hours or days.  We simply don’t have the kind of instantaneous, raw image-to-the-missile-launch-button that so many imagine.
 
Many of you still doubt that reality.  Well, here’s more proof. 
 

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is working with US Combatant Commands (COCOMS) to operationally test an early version of its Joint Regional Edge Node (J-REN) system designed to speed satellite-based intelligence to the battlefield, according to NGA officials.
 
NGA began development of J-REN — a modernization of NGA’s current information technology “pipe” to more rapidly fulfil commanders’ requests for urgent access to remote sensing imagery and analysis — just last year.[1]

The lack of timeliness of satellite imagery has been a known and on-going issue for many years and even recent advances have been insufficient.
 

The ever-increasing calls from COCOMS for more timely imagery and analysis from remote sensing satellites has been the subject of a tug-of-war between NGA and the Space Force — an issue the two agencies have been struggling to work out for more than a year.
 
The concept is to avoid clogging up limited communications bandwidth with overly-dense data packages, while still ensuring that military operators have good enough information to work with …[1]

There you have it.  If satellites were the omnipotent, all-seeing miracles with direct links to firing controls, this entire effort wouldn’t even be happening, would it?  The blindingly obvious conclusion is that the image-to-fire-control process is a slow one, as ComNavOps has repeatedly stated.
 
 
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[1]Breaking Defense website, “NGA field testing new processor to speed imagery to US regional commands”, Theresa Hitchens, 18-Apr-2025,
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/nga-field-testing-new-processor-to-speed-imagery-to-us-regional-commands/

Satellite Surveillance Reality

People keep wanting to believe that satellites can track every ship on the ocean in real time, with the data being tied directly to the launch buttons of anti-ship weapons.  I keep refuting this idea but it persists.  Here’s some relevant information on the subject from our space force. 

By the early 2030s, the Space Force hopes to have satellites equipped with sensors to target aircraft in the hands of operators, according to the service’s second in command, Gen. Michael Guetlein.
 
Satellites equipped with Air Moving Target Indicators (AMTI), which would send precise tracking data to “shooters” on the ground, at sea and in the air, would be a new capability — joining the Space Force’s joint program with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to develop Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) satellites that track vehicles and ships.
 
“I would say you’re looking at probably early ’30s for some of that capability to start coming online, both for GMTI and for AMTI,” Guetlein told the annual Defense News conference today.[1][emphasis added]

 
These statements demonstrate that satellite tracking is something that does not yet exist but is being worked on and someone hopes to have it working in several years (which, of course, will stretch out to a decade or two, at best).
 
The next quote demonstrates that data is not directly linked to anti-ship launch buttons: 

Space Force since 2021 has been pushing their case to fill part of the gap in ground tracking/targeting left by the Air Force’s retirement of the E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) aircraft. That campaign has run up against roles and missions related challenges — some of which have yet to be fully resolved — from both the NRO and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The NRO owns and operates the nation’s spy satellites, while the NGA is responsible for disseminating space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) imagery and analysis to users across the US government.[1][emphasis added]

Difficulties abound: 

… the closer I can come to the target, the more resolution I get on the target. As I move to space, it becomes harder and harder to get that same level of resolution on a target … [1]
 
… one of the key challenges for tracking enemy aircraft from space is that airplanes and drones move much faster than tanks, trucks and ships. This is compounded by the fact that to be best able to take high-quality pictures or establish radar images of objects on the ground or in the air, satellites would have to be stationed in low Earth orbit where they themselves move around the Earth at about 7.8 kilometers per second (4.8 miles per second) … [1]

 

I see a ship.  Fire!

We see, then, that the common belief in omniscient satellites, tied directly into fire control circuits is pure fantasy.  The Space Farce wants to make that a thing but the military constantly wants things that never happen (how’s that rail gun and laser coming?).  We’re looking at a decade or more for even the rudiments of this king of capability to happen and that’s probably being ridiculously optimistic.
 
Once and for all, let’s give up the fantasy of the all-seeing eye-in-the-sky providing real time weapons launch control.
 
 
 
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[1]Breaking Defense, “Space Force vice wants sats to track aircraft by early 2030s”, Theresa Hitchens, 4-Sep-2024,
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/09/space-force-vice-wants-sats-to-track-aircraft-by-early-2030s/

Satellite Space

If you’re like me, you’re aware that GPS satellites exist as do various surveillance satellites but you probably have no idea where they’re located (orbital height above sea level) or what this means in terms of war in space and satellite survivability.
 
Most people assume that all orbiting objects exist at more or less the same altitude but this is not the case.  There are various bands of orbits at various heights out to around the geosynchronous orbit at 36,000 km (22,500 mi).  Further than that is the so-called graveyard orbit where satellites are parked at the end of their operating lives if they are not de-orbited.
 
The two main orbital bands of interest for us are: 

• Low Earth Orbit (LEO) (<2000 km / 1,200 mi)
• NavStar GPS Orbit (20,180 km / 12,540 mi)

As a point of comparison, the Earth is around 4000 miles in radius (center of the Earth to the surface of the oceans)
 
Space has become a crowded place. 

US Space Command, which currently is responsible for monitoring the heavens, is tracking some 41,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimeters … [1]

… NASA, tracks over 25,000 objects larger than 10 cm in LEO, the estimated number between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is 500,000. The amount of particles bigger than 1 mm exceeds 100 million.[3]

It’s becoming even more crowded by the debris fields of anti-satellite (ASAT) tests.  Russian and Chinese ASAT test debris accounted for 20% of orbital collision warnings in 2022.[1]
 
A National Interest website article suggests that China has the capability to achieve anti-satellite kills at orbits out to Geosynchronous altitudes (35,786 km / 22,236 mi).[4]
 
One of the implications of the crowding of orbits is that when war with China comes and anti-satellite weapons are used by both sides, the number of objects (debris) in orbit will increase by orders of magnitude likely resulting in a cascade of collisions (at orbital speeds, any collision is probably totally destructive) with surviving satellites resulting in ever more debris and ever more collisions.  In other words, at some point, a chain reaction will occur which will destroy all satellites in a given orbit.
 
Legitimate uses are also contributing to the crowding. 

… the 700 to 900 kilometer band of LEO, a region that is increasingly crowded due to advent of mega-constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink communications satellites. That orbital altitude also is being used by the Space Development Agency for its planned Transport Layer of 300 to 500 high-speed, high-volume communications birds.[1]

LEO confers interesting capabilities and limitations. 

Unlike geosynchronous satellite, satellites in LEO have a small field of view and so can observe and communicate with only a fraction of the Earth at a time. This means that a network (or "constellation") of satellites is required to provide continuous coverage. Satellites in lower regions of LEO also suffer from fast orbital decay and require either periodic re-boosting to maintain a stable orbit or launching replacement satellites when old ones re-enter.[3]

As a reference and point of interest, the 20-Feb-2008 shootdown of satellite USA-193 by a SM-3 Standard missile launched by USS Lake Erie occurred at an altitude of around 250 km (155 miles).
 
Space is a lot more complex, in terms of military use and combat, than most of us realize and the implications of combat in space are poorly understood by almost all of us.
 

 
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[1]Breaking Defense, “Debris from ASAT tests creating ‘bad neighborhood’ in low Earth orbit: Analyst”, Theresa Hitchens, 16-Jun-2023,
https://breakingdefense.com/2023/06/debris-from-asat-tests-creating-bad-neighborhood-in-low-earth-orbit-analyst/
 
[2]Wikipedia, “Global Positioning System”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
 
[3]Wikipedia, “Low Earth Orbit”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit
 
[4]National Interest website, “How China Could Win a War Against America: Kill The Satellites”, Zachary Keck, 3-Oct-2019,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-china-could-win-war-against-america-kill-satellites-85176

Satellite Survivability

There are a lot of misconceptions about satellites in war.  So many people believe that they can be used to instantaneously target and attack ships at sea, as if the satellites are directly connected to the firing button of every missile shooting asset we – or the enemy – has.  That’s not even remotely true but that’s not the point of this post.

 

Another widely held belief is that every satellite in orbit will be destroyed in the opening hours of a war.  However, while the US and China have both demonstrated the ability to destroy satellites using missiles or orbital ‘seeding’ of debris, there is no evidence that either side possesses sufficient satellite destruction capacity to completely eliminate the other’s satellites in a matter of hours.  How many satellites will be destroyed in the opening days of a war?  5%?  50%?  90%?  No one knows, at least not in the public domain. 

 

What is certain is that many satellites will be quickly destroyed and that, due to depleted numbers, surviving surveillance satellites will be tasked with high priority surveillance, meaning nuclear monitoring and mass troop movements.  Individual ship movements will be a much lower priority, bordering on unavailable.

 

Everyone is focused on the physical destruction of satellites but what gets overlooked is that satellites are extremely vulnerable to being rendered inoperable (mission kill, in a sense) via software and communication attacks. 

 

All satellites depend on software control systems for guidance, movement, alignment, operation, data transmission, and data interpretation.  That represents a lot of opportunities for software disruption via cyber attacks, hacks, viruses, etc.  Every satellite that can receive a ground control signal (and that’s all of them) is susceptible to software attacks.  Just from the cyber attacks that have been publicly acknowledged, we know that China has thoroughly penetrated our industrial and military networks.  It is elementary logic to assume that China knows our satellite software systems and is prepared to cyber-disrupt our satellites the moment war begins.  Unlike the limited degree of physical destruction, cyber-destruction has the potential to eliminate nearly all our satellite capabilities.

 

The other vulnerability is communications.  After all, a fully functioning satellite is useless if its data can’t be transmitted and received.  Satellite data transmissions are vulnerable to communication link disruptions, jamming, false signal injection, etc.  We’ve seen examples of this for years with Russian interference and manipulation of GPS signals.  As with cyber-destruction of satellites, the potential for communications disruption is likely greater than the potential for physical damage.

 

It seems likely that the predictions of massive satellite ‘destruction’ in the opening hours of war are correct, however, the method of that destruction is likely to be software cyber attacks and communications disruption more so than physical destruction.  Nevertheless, the end result is the same.  We’ll have few remaining functioning satellite assets and those that survive will be tasked with only the highest priorities.  Searching for individual ships on the ocean will not be one of those tasks.

 

Satellite survivability is of immense importance for both offensive and defensive operational planning.  We have to know to what degree we can depend on satellite surveillance, if at all, and we have to know to what degree our forces will be susceptible to enemy satellite surveillance.  Hopefully, the Navy, who ought to have a much better informed grasp of all this, has taken satellite survivability into account in its planning … not that I’ve seen any evidence of war planning.

Eye In The Sky

There is a prevalent belief that satellites are magic eyes-in-the-sky that see everything at all times and can track the movements of every individual enemy soldier, ship, and plane.  In fact, this is one of the common arguments against the aircraft carrier – that it will be continuously tracked by enemy satellites and thus be totally vulnerable to attack by all manner of missiles from hundreds or thousands of miles away.  Is this really the case?  Have satellites rendered surface navies obsolete?

I have no particular specialized knowledge about satellites and their capabilities but I’m going to attempt to apply some common sense logic and see how capable satellites really are.

For starters, history, in the form of military exercises, has repeatedly shown that naval surface forces are very difficult to find using satellites.  That’s one fact that I do know.

Next, let’s look at this from a numbers perspective.  At any given moment, how many ships are in the South/East China Seas, for example?  Hundreds?  Thousands?  Asking a satellite (meaning the guy who sits and analyzes the images from a satellite) to distinguish civilian from military and friend from foe for hundreds or thousands of possibilities is an enormous task.  If the satellite “zooms” in to make ID easy, the corresponding area covered decreases.  Now, how many satellites are available for general tracking?  I have no idea but my guess would be on the order of a dozen, maybe less.  Covering the area of the South/East China Seas and the number of possible contacts is a daunting task.

I think what satellites are really good at is taking images of the same object or small piece of land repeatedly and looking for changes (silo added, submarine/ship moved from alongside a pier, etc.). 

In a war, I would think the available satellite tracking would be focused on high priority land based targets (missile silos, HQs, bases, etc.) rather than trying to dynamically track ships at sea.

I know someone is going to pound out a comment that a satellite can image a playing card in someone’s hand from up in space.  That’s probably true – if the location of the person is precisely known.  I’m not sure how that translates to spotting ships but the argument is used, nevertheless.  Consider though, the area being scanned if that level of zoom is used – a square meter, maybe?  Scanning the ocean a square meter at a time to look for ships would take forever.  Zooming out and scanning hundreds of square miles at a time will speed up the process but the contacts become mere pinpoints that are not readily identifiable.

Finally, in a high intensity war the satellites of both sides will be priority targets from day one and functioning satellites may become a rarity very quickly.

Now, let’s change tacks and consider what happens when a satellite does find and identify an enemy ship.  I have no idea how foreign countries operate their satellites but I would guess that, like any large organization, the findings go through multiple levels of bureaucracy (or command and control, if you prefer) where the findings are sorted and, eventually, disseminated to the units that can benefit from the information.  That process takes significant amounts of time.  By the time the data makes its way to a unit that could initiate an attack, the target has moved a significant distance.  Many people seem to have the idea that satellites are directly hooked into individual ships and planes thereby providing real time targeting data.  I’m pretty certain this isn’t the case.

In summary, satellites are a valuable and useful surveillance tool but hardly the all-seeing eye in the sky that many make them out to be.  The best use seems to be as monitors of fixed points, looking for changes from day to day.