The war in Ukraine turned commercial satellites into weapons of war. Now the Pentagon is building frameworks to harness that power for future conflicts — but its current approach has a fundamental flaw. By focusing on contractual access and procurement models, the military is ignoring the human, legal, and business realities that will determine whether commercial space operators actually show up when the shooting starts.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine demonstrated how privately owned satellite systems became essential to military operations in unprecedented ways. Commercial satellite services kept Ukrainian troops connected across the battlefield. Satellite imaging tracked Russian troop movements. Commercial RF-mapping constellations reportedly helped identify jamming threats. The military value was enormous, and it happened largely ad hoc.
That improvisation worked in Ukraine. But the U.S. military now faces a harder question: how do you build a formal system to harness commercial space capabilities for future wars without destroying the very things that make those capabilities useful? The Pentagon’s current answer — reserve agreements and hybrid ownership models — addresses the engineering and procurement side of the problem. It largely ignores the human factor: the CEOs who can withdraw support, the employees who question their role in warfare, the foreign customers who demand neutrality, and the lawyers who can’t agree on who bears liability when a dual-use satellite is destroyed. Until those human dimensions are confronted head-on, the Pentagon’s commercial space strategy is built on sand.
From Ad Hoc to Institutional
The U.S. Space Force is attempting to move commercial space integration from improvised wartime cooperation to something more durable and predictable. At the center of this effort is the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, or CASR, a proposed framework where commercial satellite operators would pre-commit a portion of their capacity for military use during crises.
The model borrows from the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, where commercial airlines agree in advance to make aircraft available to the Department of Defense during national emergencies. The idea sounds clean on paper. In practice, it is riddled with problems that no one has solved yet.
According to reports, officials at Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office have emphasized the challenge of integrating commercial satellite capabilities into military operations while preserving their commercial nature and avoiding turning them into military targets.
That’s a careful way of saying the Pentagon wants access to commercial networks but can’t afford to turn them into military targets in the process.
The Targeting Problem
When commercial satellites start performing military functions, adversaries notice. Konstantin Vorontsov, a senior Russian foreign ministry official, warned the United Nations that commercial satellites supporting military operations could be targeted.
This was not bluster. Russia had already demonstrated its willingness to use counterspace weapons. Before its ground forces even crossed into Ukraine, Russia is believed to have conducted widespread GPS jamming affecting drones monitoring the military buildup near the Ukrainian border. At the outset of the invasion, Russian forces hacked Viasat, a U.S. company whose ground terminals the Ukrainian military had purchased for secure communications. Moscow also reportedly employed jamming tactics against Starlink terminals.
The CSIS Aerospace Security Project has documented a clear pattern of Russian counterspace activities. Electronic warfare, cyberattacks, and signal jamming are cheaper and quieter than shooting down satellites, and they are proliferating fast.
For commercial operators considering a CASR-style agreement with the Pentagon, this creates an uncomfortable calculation. Signing up to support the U.S. military in wartime could mean having your satellites declared legitimate targets by an adversary. That affects insurance, international business relationships, and the willingness of foreign customers to use your services.
This raises a critical and still-unanswered question at the heart of the CASR concept: who bears liability when a commercial asset enrolled in a military reserve framework is targeted by an adversary? And can commercial providers actually be relied upon to deliver when the stakes — and the risks — become existential?
The Liability Gap
No one has answered that liability question with any legal certainty. International humanitarian law requires distinguishing between military objectives and civilian objects. Commercial satellites clearly serve civilian populations. But when those same satellites are routing military communications or providing battlefield imagery, they become “dual-use” assets, and the legal protections get murky.
Analysis of this problem is sobering: there is no bright-line rule in how military uses of commercial satellites can be lawfully targeted while also minimizing harm to civilian users, who may depend on the same commercial satellite services. A Starlink terminal connecting a Ukrainian artillery battery and a Starlink terminal connecting a hospital in Kyiv might be served by the same satellite. The law of armed conflict was not written for this kind of entanglement.
For commercial operators, the business risk is real. Emily Harding, a senior fellow at CSIS, reportedly told Military.com that employees at commercial satellite companies were debating the implications of their involvement in military operations. This is the human factor the Pentagon’s procurement frameworks cannot address: the engineers, executives, and board members who must decide whether their company’s participation in warfare is worth the moral, legal, and financial exposure.
CASR participation could also mean diverting bandwidth from paying customers during a crisis. Satellite operators run businesses with contractual obligations to commercial clients worldwide. Pulling capacity to serve the U.S. military in a conflict with China, for example, could alienate customers across Asia and create legal exposure on multiple fronts.
A Different Approach: Government-Owned, Commercially Built
Partly because of these unresolved questions, the Pentagon appears to be hedging. Rather than relying solely on emergency access agreements with commercial operators, the Department of Defense is increasingly investing in government-owned satellite systems that are built and operated by commercial companies.
This model gives the military direct control over the hardware while still benefiting from the speed and cost advantages of commercial manufacturing. Satellites are getting cheaper and faster to build, and that trajectory opens a practical path for the Pentagon to own its own constellations without the decade-long procurement timelines that once defined military space programs.
Industry officials have described versions of this approach in terms of “Mini GEO” systems that would allow the government to relatively cheaply run and operate their own geo network constellation. Hybrid networks carrying both commercial and military traffic also create a cybersecurity advantage: adversaries can’t easily determine how traffic is routed across a mixed network, making targeted attacks harder.
Modern hybrid architectures can also allocate bandwidth dynamically as conditions change, rather than reserving fixed capacity slices that sit unused until a crisis.
The Broader Strategic Shift
What’s happening here is a fundamental rethinking of how the U.S. military relates to commercial space. For decades, the relationship was transactional: the Pentagon bought satellite services the way it bought office supplies. Ukraine changed that. Commercial space became a warfighting capability overnight, and the military discovered it had no framework for managing that dependency.
The Space Force’s efforts to build that framework are still early. As we previously covered, companies like Apex Satellite are already repositioning their businesses to serve Pentagon demand for rapidly deployable satellite platforms. The commercial space industry sees which way the wind is blowing.
But the core tension remains unresolved. The Pentagon wants commercial speed, commercial innovation, and commercial cost structures. It also wants guaranteed access during wartime, resilience against adversary attack, and operational security. These goals pull in different directions.
A commercial satellite operator optimizes for revenue, coverage, and customer satisfaction. A military satellite operator optimizes for survivability, redundancy, and mission assurance. Trying to get one system to do both is possible, but it requires trade-offs that neither side has fully agreed to.
What Ukraine Taught and What It Didn’t
Ukraine demonstrated what commercial space can do in wartime. SpaceX showed remarkable agility, overcoming Russian jamming with rapid software updates to Starlink terminals. Imaging companies provided intelligence that would have been classified a generation ago. The contribution was real and significant.
But Ukraine also exposed the fragility of depending on commercial goodwill. SpaceX pulled back support for certain Ukrainian military uses of Starlink, citing concerns about the system’s military applications. Elon Musk’s company sought Pentagon funding to sustain the network’s role in the conflict. The world’s most capable commercial satellite constellation was, at key moments, subject to the business decisions and personal inclinations of a single CEO.
That is not a model the U.S. military can plan wars around.
The questions raised by Ukraine have grown more pressing as tensions with China over Taiwan intensify. A conflict in the Indo-Pacific would involve far greater distances, far more bandwidth demand, and a far more capable adversary in space than Russia has proven to be. China’s counterspace capabilities are at least as advanced as Russia’s and in some areas more so.
The stakes are high enough that the conversation about reorganizing U.S. space governance has gained momentum, with some arguing the existing structure is too fragmented to manage the military-commercial relationship effectively.
What the Pentagon Should Do Next
The Pentagon’s dual-track approach — pursuing both CASR-style agreements and government-owned commercial systems — reflects an honest assessment that no single model works. CASR might secure some capacity for lower-intensity crises. Government-owned constellations might provide the backbone for high-end conflicts where commercial operators can’t be guaranteed to participate.
But neither track will succeed unless the military confronts the human factor directly. Here is what that requires:
First, the Department of Defense needs to establish a clear liability framework before the next conflict, not during it. Commercial operators will not sign binding reserve agreements without knowing what happens to their balance sheets when an adversary destroys a satellite enrolled in CASR. Congress should legislate a compensation and indemnification structure modeled on the SAFETY Act, which limits liability for companies providing anti-terrorism technologies. Without this, CASR will remain a paper exercise.
Second, the Pentagon must develop a classification of commercial space engagement tiers that gives operators genuine choice about their level of military integration — and transparently communicates the targeting risks associated with each tier. A company providing weather data to the military faces a different risk calculus than one routing tactical communications for a carrier strike group. Treating them the same is both dishonest and strategically counterproductive.
Third, the military should accelerate investment in government-owned, commercially built constellations as the primary backbone for high-end conflict scenarios and stop pretending that CASR alone can fill the gap in a peer conflict with China. Commercial augmentation should be exactly what the name implies — augmentation, not the load-bearing wall.
The first commercial space war happened by accident. The next one won’t. The Pentagon has time to get this right, but only if it stops treating the integration of commercial space as a procurement problem and starts treating it as what it actually is: a problem of human trust, legal clarity, and institutional honesty about the costs of asking private companies to go to war.
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