When Russian missiles knocked out cell towers and internet lines across Ukraine in the opening months of the 2022 invasion, Ukrainian troops kept fighting in part because thousands of small Starlink satellites overhead maintained their communications. That improvised lifeline, delivered by a commercial company rather than a military agency, rewrote assumptions in defense ministries from Washington to Beijing about what wins wars in the 21st century.
Now, as of spring 2026, the scramble to control low Earth orbit has become one of the defining military competitions of the decade. The United States, the European Union, and China are each building or buying constellations of hundreds to thousands of LEO satellites designed to give their forces secure communications, real-time surveillance, and targeting data that adversaries cannot easily jam or destroy. The stakes are straightforward: in the next major conflict, the side with resilient satellite networks will see the battlefield clearly, while the side without them will be fighting partially blind.
The U.S. bet on commercial and military LEO
The Pentagon has moved on two parallel tracks. In April 2024, the Department of Defense published a formal Commercial Space Integration Strategy that treats private-sector LEO constellations not as optional extras but as load-bearing elements of military communications, intelligence, and command networks. By issuing the strategy at the department level rather than through a single service branch, officials signaled that commercial space is now a cross-service priority touching everything from battlefield connectivity to missile warning.
Separately, the Space Development Agency has been launching its own government-owned LEO constellation under the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA. The architecture is designed in rolling “tranches” of satellites that provide missile-tracking, data-relay, and custody-transfer capabilities across a mesh network in low orbit. Tranche 0 satellites began reaching orbit in 2023, and subsequent tranches are expanding the constellation’s size and capability. The logic is redundancy: rather than relying on a handful of exquisite, expensive satellites that an adversary could target, the SDA is fielding large numbers of smaller, cheaper spacecraft that can absorb losses and keep functioning.
SpaceX’s Starshield program adds another layer. Built on the same manufacturing line as Starlink’s commercial broadband satellites, Starshield is tailored for government and military customers, with enhanced encryption and the ability to host sensor payloads. Contracts between SpaceX and the National Reconnaissance Office, reported by major outlets including Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, point to a classified constellation that could number in the hundreds of satellites. The combination of PWSA, Starshield, and broader commercial integration gives the U.S. military a LEO posture that no other country currently matches in scale.
Europe builds its own sovereign constellation
European leaders drew a different lesson from Ukraine. Starlink’s role in the war demonstrated LEO’s military value, but it also exposed a vulnerability: Europe had no comparable constellation of its own and was dependent on a single American commercial provider whose service could be altered, throttled, or cut for political or business reasons.
The EU’s answer is IRIS², a secure space-based connectivity system approved by the Council of the European Union in March 2023 through Regulation (EU) 2023/588. The legal text establishes the Union Secure Connectivity Programme with a mandate running from 2023 to 2027, a multi-orbit architecture that includes LEO satellites, and encrypted government communications designed to resist jamming and cyber interference.
IRIS² is explicitly framed around sovereignty and resilience. The regulation defines a system intended to provide secure connectivity for public authorities and critical infrastructure operators across the EU, delivered through public-private partnerships but under European governance. Contracts for the constellation’s initial deployment have been awarded to a European industrial consortium, with first launches expected before the programme’s 2027 deadline. The system will not rival Starlink in sheer satellite count, but its purpose is different: guaranteed, encrypted links for government use that no foreign entity controls.
China’s massive filings signal ambition
The competition extends well beyond the Atlantic alliance. China has filed plans with the International Telecommunication Union for two enormous LEO constellations: Guowang, with roughly 13,000 satellites, and a second system sometimes referred to as GW-2 or SatNet, with approximately 12,000 more. These filings, which are public ITU records, represent spectrum and orbital slot reservations rather than guaranteed deployments, but they signal Beijing’s intent to build LEO infrastructure on a scale comparable to or exceeding SpaceX’s Starlink.
China’s motivations mirror those driving Washington and Brussels. The People’s Liberation Army watched the same Ukraine footage and recognized that LEO constellations offer communications resilience, persistent surveillance, and targeting support that traditional satellite architectures cannot match. Chinese state media and defense commentators have discussed LEO’s military applications openly, and the country’s commercial space sector has accelerated launch cadences to begin populating these constellations.
Russia, meanwhile, has signaled ambitions to rebuild its space-based communications and surveillance capabilities, but its programs remain less transparent and have been hampered by economic sanctions and industrial constraints. Moscow’s ability to field a competitive LEO constellation in the near term is widely doubted by Western analysts, though its electronic warfare and anti-satellite capabilities remain a serious factor in the broader space competition.
Why LEO changes the military calculus
The physics of low Earth orbit explain why defense planners are so focused on it. LEO satellites orbit between roughly 300 and 2,000 kilometers above the surface, compared to about 36,000 kilometers for traditional geostationary communications satellites. That proximity cuts signal latency from roughly 600 milliseconds round-trip for geostationary links to as low as 20 to 40 milliseconds for LEO, a difference that matters enormously for real-time targeting, drone control, and coordinated maneuver.
Large LEO constellations also offer what engineers call “graceful degradation.” If an adversary destroys or jams one satellite in a network of several hundred, the remaining spacecraft reroute traffic and maintain coverage. Destroying enough satellites to knock out the network entirely would require an anti-satellite campaign of a scale that no country has demonstrated, and the debris generated would threaten the attacker’s own orbital assets. This distributed resilience is the core military appeal, and it represents a fundamental shift from the era when a single well-placed anti-satellite missile could blind an opponent’s space-based communications.
The commercial economics reinforce the strategic logic. Companies like SpaceX have driven the cost of building and launching small satellites down dramatically through reusable rockets and mass production. That cost curve makes it feasible for governments to buy or build constellations of hundreds of spacecraft for a fraction of what a single large geostationary military satellite costs, and to replenish losses faster than an adversary can inflict them.
The gaps that remain
For all the momentum, significant questions remain unanswered. Neither the Pentagon’s integration strategy nor the EU’s IRIS² regulation specifies the exact number of LEO satellites each side plans to field for military or secure government use. Without those figures, comparing Western buildouts against Chinese plans is an exercise in estimation rather than precision.
Interoperability between U.S. and European systems is another open problem. The Pentagon’s strategy focuses on integrating American commercial providers into DoD operations, but it does not publicly detail how allied European systems like IRIS² would plug into joint NATO operations or share encrypted links during a coalition conflict. NATO declared space an operational domain in 2019 and has taken steps to integrate space capabilities into alliance planning, but the practical question of whether American and European LEO constellations can seamlessly share data in a crisis has not been publicly resolved.
Budget transparency is limited on all sides. The EU regulation establishes broad financial envelopes for IRIS² but does not itemize how much flows to LEO satellite procurement versus ground infrastructure or cybersecurity. The Pentagon’s strategy sets policy direction without disclosing contract values, many of which are classified. China’s constellation spending is even more opaque.
Perhaps the most consequential uncertainty involves the rules of engagement in orbit. No international treaty specifically governs military attacks on LEO constellations, and the legal frameworks that do exist, primarily the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, were written for an era of single-digit satellite counts. How governments will handle the targeting of commercial satellites used for military purposes, the liability for debris, and the escalation risks of orbital combat are questions that policymakers have barely begun to address publicly.
A competition already underway
The race for LEO military advantage is not a future scenario. Satellites are already in orbit, strategies have been published, regulations have been enacted, and billions of dollars and euros are flowing into hardware. The United States holds the current lead in deployed LEO capacity thanks to the combination of SpaceX’s commercial and government constellations and the SDA’s expanding architecture. Europe is building toward sovereign capability with IRIS². China is filing aggressively for orbital slots and ramping up launches.
What no one yet knows is how these overlapping buildouts will interact in a real crisis. The next major conflict involving a space-capable adversary will test whether distributed LEO constellations deliver the resilience their advocates promise, whether commercial operators can be relied upon for wartime functions, and whether the international order can absorb the shock of deliberate satellite destruction. Those answers will come from orbit, not from strategy documents. But the strategy documents confirm that the world’s major military powers are already placing their bets.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
