Commercial space as a battleground

Together, these data points marked a watershed. Space — the domain of navigation satellites, weather observation, and strategic communication — became, for the first time, an active warfighting domain: a theatre of operations where assets 

were targeted, capabilities were degraded, and outcomes on the ground were directly shaped by events 550 kilometres (km) above the Earth. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is, in this sense, the world’s most consequential live space warfare laboratory, and its lessons have direct and urgent implications for India. 

Structural challenges

To understand the magnitude of the commercial space contribution to Ukraine’s war effort, the most revealing exercise is the counterfactual: what would have happened without it? SpaceX’s Starlink constellation provided 42,000 truck-mobile, 

flat-panel terminals delivering 100 to 200 megabits per second of broadband at 20-millisecond latency — adequate for drone flight control — at frontline positions where Ukraine’s terrestrial fibre and mobile networks were being systematically dismantled by the Russian missile and artillery strikes. Without Starlink, Ukrainian forces would have fallen back to high-frequency radio and physical message runners: a 1940s command environment against a 2022 adversary. The entire drone campaign — Ukraine’s primary tactical asymmetric advantage — is contingent on Starlink connectivity. FPV (first-person view) drone operators cannot fly without a low-latency data link. HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket system) coordinates cannot be transmitted without secure broadband. The intelligence relay from spotter to fire direction centre collapses. To state it plainly, the drone war that defined the conflict’s tactical character would not exist without Starlink.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) added another irreplaceable layer of capability. ICEYE, a Finnish SAR microsatellite operator, imaged through cloud cover and darkness — conditions that render optical satellites blind — to document the Bucha atrocities, the Kakhovka dam breach, and the Mariupol siege, in some cases within hours of the events. Capella Space and Umbra detected new vehicle emplacements overnight, giving Ukrainian commanders advance notice of Russian offensive preparations. Without SAR, Russia’s winter offensives — deliberately timed to exploit cloud cover — would have remained invisible. Night operations, which are inherent Russian doctrinal strengths forged in decades of cold-weather training, would have been impossible to track, anticipate, or counter. Meanwhile, Maxar Technologies released 30 centimetres (cm) resolution satellite imagery of Russian troop concentrations publicly in the weeks before the invasion — a deliberate act of strategic deterrence using commercial imagery that was unprecedented in military history. When deterrence failed, Planet Labs tracked Russian force reconstitution, logistics movements, and, most consequentially, the grain theft from Ukrainian silos at a rate of daily revisit. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has used open-source satellite imagery as evidence of war crimes. Without this layer, Russia would have controlled the information narrative entirely, the Bucha massacre would have gone undocumented, and global support for Ukraine would have eroded.  

The crucial initial moments

Open-source satellite imagery has permanently democratised battlefield accountability, furnishing the legal accountability mechanism with detailed, time-stamped evidence.

But inside this success story lies a structural vulnerability with serious strategic implications. In October 2022, citing fears of nuclear escalation, Elon Musk unilaterally restricted Starlink coverage over Crimea to prevent a Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian Black Sea Fleet. A single commercial chief executive, answerable to no government and treaty, made a strategic military decision that shaped the outcome of a military operation. 

This is the single-vendor dependency trap in its most dangerous form — a trap that did not exist in previous generations of military communications architecture, where doctrine and procurement were aligned and chains of command were unambiguous.

There is a direct Indian parallel. During the 1999 Kargil conflict, India was denied access to the latest imagery of our area of interest during active hostilities. The lesson of Kargil — that foreign commercial imagery access is discretionary, not guaranteed — went inadequately acted upon for two decades. In any future conflict with China, the geopolitical pressure on Western commercial operators to restrict imagery and communications services to Indian forces could be substantial. Peacetime goodwill cannot be relied upon to hold under the pressure of a live crisis in which a provider government judges its own strategic interests to be at stake. The Musk-Crimea episode is not an anomaly of one man’s judgment. It is a structural feature of commercial dependency.

The most consequential and least publicly debated dimension of the conflict’s space component is the emergence of commercial satellites as explicit military objectives — both as weapons and as targets — in the complete absence of an adequate legal framework governing their status. The ViaSat attack constitutes the first use of a cyber weapon against a commercial satellite to achieve a military effect. Russian state media openly threatened to treat Starlink satellites as legitimate military targets. Open-source intelligence satellites operated by Planet Labs and Maxar, whose imagery has been submitted as evidence to the ICC for war crimes prosecutions, will be pre-emptively targeted in future conflicts — not to degrade military communications, but to destroy the accountability mechanism before evidence can be gathered. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit and the establishment of military bases on celestial bodies, but says nothing about cyberattacks on commercial satellite ground infrastructure. International Humanitarian Law (IHL) applies in the space domain, but the Tallinn Manual process — which has established cyber warfare norms for terrestrial and maritime contexts — has not yet produced a volume addressing the space segment in equivalent detail.

When a commercial satellite operator provides services that enable military operations, as Starlink did, the question of whether it becomes a legitimate military objective under Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions is, in current international law, genuinely ambiguous. And ambiguity in the laws of war is reliably exploited by the belligerent who benefits from it. Four frameworks are, therefore, urgently required: a Space Assets Non-Attack Protocol under COPUOS modelled on the Antarctic Treaty’s sanctuary principle; an accelerated Tallinn Manual process extending IHL explicitly to the space segment; mandatory cybersecurity baseline standards for commercial satellite operators receiving government defence contracts; and a commercial operator indemnity framework modelled on the US’ Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve programme, providing insurance, rapid replacement guarantees, and government indemnification for operators whose satellites are targeted as a consequence of supporting national defence operations. 

Counter-space campaign

Russia’s counter-space campaign in Ukraine operated across five vectors, and an honest assessment of its effectiveness reveals both the sophistication of the threat and the surprising resilience of well-architected commercial systems. The ViaSat cyberattack at H-hour was well-prepared, precisely timed, and initially effective — disabling Ukrainian military Satcom for several critical hours. However, its cascading effects were poorly controlled: the same wiper malware disabled approximately 5,800 wind turbines across Germany, demonstrating that attacks on commercial satellite infrastructure generate unintended civilian cascades that are strategically counterproductive. Ground-based electronic warfare jamming of Starlink uplinks was then deployed at scale. SpaceX’s response — an over-the-air anti-jamming firmware update pushed to all terminals within 48 hours — rendered the jamming substantially ineffective. The equivalent military procurement cycle for the same firmware update would have required approximately 18 months. Commercial agility is not merely a convenience. It is a doctrinal advantage that state-owned systems cannot yet replicate. Global positioning system (GPS) spoofing proved locally effective, with vessels near Crimea displaying ghost positions up to 25 km off course and Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles experiencing navigation errors. But the most strategically consequential counter-space action was arguably the least technical: the political lever of nuclear escalation threats that influenced Musk’s Crimea decision. This required no satellite, no missile, and no jammer — just a phone call and the credible invocation of existential risk.

What Ukraine’s resilience reveals, however, is more instructive than Russia’s attacks. Five architectural principles defined Ukraine’s ability to survive and adapt. First, redundant communication paths ensured that when Starlink was jammed, HF radio carried the command signal; when HF was jammed, LoRa mesh networks provided the backup — meaning no single kill-shot could silence the system entirely. Second, software agility over hardware: the ability to update firmware faster than an adversary can adapt its jamming is a decisive operational advantage. Third, distributed and mobile ground infrastructure eliminated central nodes worth targeting. Fourth, mandatory post-ViaSat cybersecurity reforms — zero-trust architecture, network segmentation, and ground station auditing — substantially reduced the attack surface. Fifth, constellation diversity across Planet, Maxar, ICEYE, BlackSky, and Capella meant Russia could not suppress all intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sources simultaneously. Resilience, this conflict demonstrated, is architecture, not equipment. Ukraine survived not because any single system was unjammable, but because no single system was essential.

The Ukraine conflict also provides the most rigorous real-world evaluation of new space technologies yet conducted, and the verdict is stratified. Three technologies clearly delivered. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven change detection drastically reduced the intelligence cycle: Planet Labs and Maxar deployed machine learning to auto-detect vehicle concentrations, earthwork construction, and logistics changes between consecutive daily imagery passes, compressing the ISR analytical cycle from days — with human analysts reviewing imagery pixel by pixel — to hours, with AI flagging anomalies and humans performing verification. Starlink LEO broadband delivered tactical communications at a quality and scale no military system of comparable mobility had previously achieved. Commercial SAR from ICEYE and other providers has permanently shifted the baseline for conflict-zone ISR: all-weather, day-and-night sub-metre resolution from microsatellites that cost a fraction of their military equivalents is now the new normal.

Two technologies showed genuine promise but fell short of full operational integration. On-orbit edge AI processing — in which computation occurs aboard the satellite rather than on the ground, reducing downlink bandwidth requirements — was demonstrated by Satellogic and others. The technology functioned. However, the military data pipeline was not mature enough to fully exploit it. Radio frequency (RF) signal geolocation, demonstrated by HawkEye 360’s clusters of formation-flying satellites tracking naval vessels and electronic warfare activations from LEO, proved the concept brilliantly, but insufficient revisit rate limited its utility for near-real-time targeting. One technology failed to deliver against its doctrinal promise altogether. Responsive launch — the concept of replacing a destroyed or degraded satellite within days of an attack — did not occur in any instance throughout the conflict. Rocket Lab and SpaceX both possess the technical capacity to surge launch rates, but the pre-positioned hardware, pre-planned orbital slots, and rapid integration pipelines required for a 72-hour replacement cycle have proven to be major hurdles that have yet to be overcome. Responsive space remains, for the moment, a doctrine without an operational capability. The lesson India must internalise from this verdict is that investment in ground infrastructure, data pipelines, and cybersecurity — the unglamorous components of the space enterprise — is as strategically important as investment in the satellites themselves. 

India’s space posture

Applying the Ukraine framework to India’s space security posture produces a mixed but urgent assessment. India has made genuine and significant strides. Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) carries over 50 years of operational heritage. NavIC is designed to provide an indigenous positioning, navigation, and timing capability independent of GPS, though it currently remains well short of its full in-orbit satellite count. Cartosat-3 delivers 25-cm resolution optical imagery. GSAT-7 and 7A provide dedicated Satcom to the navy and air force, respectively. Mission Shakti in March 2019 established a credible, if deliberately restrained, kinetic counter-space capability. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre has catalysed over 300 commercial space start-ups, including Pixxel for hyperspectral imaging, Skyroot and Agnikul for small launch vehicles, and Dhruva Space for satellite integration. The foundation is real, and the ecosystem is alive.

The gaps are equally real and, in the light of Ukraine, alarming. India has no sovereign commercial ISR constellation: Cartosat’s revisit rate of one to two days is too slow by an order of magnitude for real-time military tasking. India has no Space Situational Awareness (SSA) architecture capable of detecting China’s Shijian-25 co-orbital satellite — which has demonstrated the ability to manoeuvre to within metres of other satellites in geosynchronous orbit — approaching an Indian geostationary (GEO) communications satellite before it ceases to function. GSAT-7 terminals lack software-defined anti-jamming capability and low probability of intercept waveforms. India’s space policy architecture is still evolving, with frameworks for space-cyber doctrine, directed-energy capabilities, and commercial satellite indemnity yet to be fully established. The threat is concrete and near-term. China’s People’s Liberation Army Aerospace Force operates almost 400 military satellites. ISR data sharing between Pakistan and China targets Indian deployments along the Line of Actual Control and in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), as demonstrated during Operation Sindoor, where Chinese satellite intelligence enhanced Pakistan’s situational awareness during active hostilities. 

Technology verdict

From this assessment, seven specific imperatives emerge for India’s space security architecture. The first and most urgent is the construction of a sovereign commercial ISR constellation. Ukraine’s lesson — that without domestic ISR capacity, operational blindness follows whenever foreign suppliers exercise discretion — must be applied directly to Kargil’s lesson. A 20-satellite LEO constellation combining SAR and optical capabilities, funded through IN-SPACe national security anchor contracts, is achievable within five years. Pixxel, SatSure, and Dhruva Space already possess the components. The missing element is a government demand signal sufficient to justify the investment. The second imperative is Satcom hardening. GSAT-7 terminals must be upgraded with software-defined anti-jamming capability and low probability of intercept (LPI) waveforms. The benchmark is SpaceX’s 48-hour firmware update that neutralised Russian jamming: India must build the equivalent in-country capability through BEL and Hughes India, indigenising the anti-jam ASIC chipsets that are currently import-dependent. The third is NavIC operationalisation and resilience. Ukraine’s GPS-only dependency was a jamming vulnerability exploited by Russia’s Borisoglebsk-2 electronic warfare systems. India’s NavIC single-constellation architecture replicates the same structural risk. NavIC Phase 2 — expanding to 11 satellites — must be accelerated from its current 2029 timeline to 2027. An encrypted NavIC-M military signal and anti-spoofing RAIM-plus algorithms in all military receivers are essential components.

The fourth imperative is the construction of a national SSA architecture. India currently has no independent capacity to detect, track, and characterise threats to its own satellites. A national space surveillance network — comprising deep-space radars, optical telescopes, and an AI-enabled orbital anomaly detection centre under the Defence Space Agency (DSA) — is non-negotiable. Bilateral SSA data sharing with the US Space Command under the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement is already legally available and should be activated immediately. The fifth is the development of non-kinetic 

counter-space capabilities. Mission Shakti demonstrated that India possesses kinetic ASAT capability. Russia’s Peresvet directed-energy system, which can dazzle and temporarily blind satellite sensors without creating debris, illustrates the strategic utility of reversible, deniable, non-kinetic effects. Defence Research and Development Organisation’s (DRDO) Defence Research and Development Laboratory should lead a ground-based directed-energy programme, while offensive cyber tools targeting adversary satellite ground stations, under NSA and NTRO authority, and electronic countermeasures for adversary Satcom denial in the IOR are achievable near-term capabilities. 

India's sever priorities

The sixth imperative is the scaling up of the commercial space sector specifically for national security applications. Ukraine received Starlink within 48 hours of the invasion because SpaceX had already built the system. Surge capacity exists only with peacetime investment. A dedicated space security fund, a procurement mandate requiring a substantial proportion of DSA contracts to be sourced from IN-SPACe companies, and responsive launch contracts with Skyroot and Agnikul for rapid satellite replacement are the necessary structural interventions. The seventh imperative is doctrine, law, and partnership. The DSA requires a public space warfare doctrine — a foundational document defining how India plans to operate in a contested, degraded, and denied space environment. India should champion the Space Assets Non-Attack Protocol at COPUOS, leverage the Quad Space Working Group for SSA data sharing, and activate the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) framework for technology cooperation in space-based capabilities. Annual multi-service exercises testing space-denial scenarios, degraded Satcom operations, and GPS-denied navigation are an operational necessity.

Three truths emerge from the Russia-Ukraine conflict with sufficient clarity to serve as strategic imperatives. The first is that commercial space is no longer supplementary to military operations — it is the backbone. Without Starlink, commercial SAR, and open-source optical imagery, the Ukrainian military’s operational calculus does not hold. This has a direct corollary for India: sovereign ISR, hardened Satcom, and a scaled commercial space sector are not aspirational capabilities — they are survival requirements in a conflict with a peer adversary that has already invested heavily in counter-space operations. The second truth is that technology performance in this conflict was stratified. AI-driven change detection, LEO broadband, and commercial SAR delivered beyond expectation. Edge computing and RF geolocation demonstrated their potential but await the data pipeline and constellation density to fulfil it. Responsive launch remains doctrine without operational capability. The investment in ground infrastructure, data pipelines, and cybersecurity is as strategically important as investment in the satellites themselves. The third truth is that commercial satellites have become military targets without a legal framework adequate to govern or constrain their targeting. The legal vacuum will be exploited — deliberately — in every future conflict. India must not wait for others to set the norms. India's engagement in COPUOS, its sponsorship of a Space Assets Non-Attack Protocol, and its development of a domestic commercial satellite indemnity framework are not merely defensive legal measures — they are acts of norm-setting that will shape the rules of the domain in which India must operate for the next century.

India’s space programme has built, over 50 years, a foundation of genuine strategic value. NavIC, Mission Shakti, Cartosat, GSAT, and IN-SPACe’s commercial ecosystem represent assets that most nations cannot match. What the Russia-Ukraine conflict has made brutally clear is that those assets are insufficient for the threat environment of the next decade, and that the gap between what India has and what it needs is both well-defined and closeable, if the political will and the procurement speed can be mobilised before a crisis makes urgency irrelevant.