The Highest Monopoly

The highest monopoly on Earth is violence. Money, information, transport and energy are powerful because they change what people can do, and each of them, pushed far enough, meets the question of who can compel someone who refuses. That does not reduce all power to violence. Most court orders are obeyed by people who accept the court and never meet a marshal. But when acceptance fails, force is what is left, which is why the right to use it is the monopoly the others lean on.

Max Weber gave the definition in a lecture at Munich University, published in 1919: a state is "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."¹ He added that force is not a state's normal or only means, only the one specific to it.¹ The word that carries the weight is "legitimate". Legitimacy is a claim about who may use force; capability is a fact about who can.

Weber also described how the monopoly was built. The modern state began, he said, when princes expropriated "those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization", a process he called "a complete parallel" to capitalism's expropriation of independent producers.¹ In the modern state no official owns "the buildings, stores, tools, and war machines he controls", and Weber called that separation "essential for the concept of state".¹

The legal half of that monopoly is intact. The material half is drifting back into private hands, sold to the state as services: the satellites that carry military communications, the rockets that put sensors in orbit, the clouds that hold the data. Where a single firm operates a layer the state cannot quickly replace, formal authority over force stops telling you who can stop it. In October 2026 a network that a country at war depends on was capped for about ten days, and who capped it is still not settled.

Who slowed the drones

In mid-October 2026, Ukrainian units found that their satellite terminals lost connection when moving faster than about 160 kilometres an hour.²³ Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to President Zelensky, said SpaceX had imposed the limit without notifying Ukraine's forces, that it had disrupted missions, and that the network carried the interceptor drones Ukraine uses against Russia's Shaheds.² Stationary terminals and short-range drones on direct radio links were largely untouched; the cap fell on faster drones flying beyond radio range.⁴

The cap applied to Starlink and to Starshield, its military-grade version, whose biggest customer is the Pentagon.³⁵ Ukraine's forces used the terminals, Germany and Poland help pay for its Starlink service, and SpaceX operates both networks.⁶⁷ Over the following days, everyone with a claim to authority over the system gave a different account of who had decided.

Elon Musk wrote that "Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the U.S. government" and that any limits "are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS."² Reuters, citing two US officials and a Western official, reported that the order came from inside the White House, though not from whom, and a senior official said the president had never made such a request.⁵ The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk ordered the cap and that he and President Trump discussed it, by some accounts before it was imposed as well as after.⁸ Some US officials said Musk acted unilaterally.⁴ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the president "doesn't run that company and can't direct that company to do anything."³ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said "there are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to" and that "Starlink has the option to make those decisions."³ Vice President JD Vance said Musk would not want to get into a war between two states "without the United States government effectively directing him on what to do."³ Asked who ordered it, Trump said: "I have no idea, but I wouldn't tell you if I did."⁹

On October 24, Ukraine's defence ministry reported speeds above 400 kilometres an hour and called access restored.⁹ A person familiar with the matter told CNN that Trump had asked Musk by phone to restore it.⁹ Trump's own summary was "I guess the bottom line, he put it back."³

The accounts conflict, and none settles who decided. Each possibility is troubling in its own way. If the US government decided, its Secretary of State denied it and its Defense Secretary pointed at a company's terms of service. If the company decided, a private operator limited a foreign army's air defence on its own judgment, using a network its owner says the US government controls. If the owner and the president arrived at it together in conversation, then a decision about another country's capacity to defend itself was made outside any channel that leaves a record. In every version, a state's capacity to use force was limited for days by a decision that no one would own.

It was not the first decision of its kind. In 2022 Ukraine asked SpaceX to activate Starlink "all the way to Sevastopol" for a drone attack on the Russian fleet, and Musk refused, writing that SpaceX would otherwise be "explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation."¹⁰ That refusal broke no law and fired no weapon. Private power over force tends to take this shape: a coverage area not extended, a speed cap, a service withheld.

What the state rents

Dependence on private industry is old. In 1961 Dwight Eisenhower said the United States had been "compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions" and must guard against "unwarranted influence" by what he called the military-industrial complex.¹¹ His worry was influence over decisions. The arms makers of his era delivered things the state then owned and operated; a rifle, once delivered, does not take instructions from its maker. A service is delivered continuously, so the company that runs it keeps the ability to change it after the contract is signed. That is the difference between buying the means of force and renting them.

The state now rents a great deal. In April 2025 the Space Force divided its next five years of most demanding national-security launches, 54 in all, among three companies, expecting SpaceX to fly 28, ULA 19 and Blue Origin seven.¹² When ULA's Vulcan was sidelined by a booster anomaly in February 2026, the service had to reshuffle missions, and the chairman of a House subcommittee expected "at least a six month delay to any Vulcan launch."¹³ In the third quarter of 2026 alone, SpaceX signed 18 more national-security launch missions.¹⁴ The Pentagon has bought dedicated Starshield satellites, including a reconnaissance constellation for the National Reconnaissance Office.⁵ In 2025, for a planned military network of nearly 500 satellites called MILNET, Starshield was on contract "providing satellites, terminals and operations support".¹⁵ Operations support means the company keeps running what it sold.

The Space Force says openly that it cannot own enough of this itself. Its Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, modelled on the airline fleet the military can call on in a crisis, exists because demand for satellite communications is, in the words of the chief of space operations, "certainly more than the government can put on orbit."¹⁶ In 2025 one question its planners had not settled was whether serving the military would require companies to curtail service to their other customers.¹⁶

The Musk companies are one illustration of where this leads, not the whole of it. They show it sharply, because launch, satellites and computing now sit under one roof. In its third quarter of 2026 SpaceX reported revenue of $14.6 billion, up from $5.6 billion a year earlier, driven by artificial-intelligence business it calls "Super Intelligence" as well as connectivity.¹⁴ Its whole space segment, which covers its launch business, brought in $1.8 billion, up 6 percent on the year, and enterprise and government connectivity $2.1 billion, against $1.1 billion a year earlier.¹⁴ Those lines were about half of SpaceX's revenue a year ago and are about a quarter now, and government is only part of them. The state's oldest lever over a contractor is its money, and against this company that lever is getting lighter.

The documented cases so far concern Ukraine, a state that owns little of the network it fights with. Nothing public shows American forces constrained the same way, and the contracts that would say whether they could be are not public.

Four kinds of power over force

Four things get called power over force, and the October episode pulled them apart. Authority is the right to order force used; in the United States it sits with Congress, the president and the chain of command, and no company claims it. Capability is the technical means of carrying an order out: drones, terminals, satellites, data. Interruption is the ability to stop or constrain an operation already under way, and it sits with whoever can change the layer the operation runs on, which may be the operator, the customer, or both. Accountability is the practical ability to learn who decided and to hold them to it.

These can line up cleanly with a private operator in the middle. In March 2025, when Washington paused intelligence sharing with Kyiv, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency cut Ukraine's access to its commercial imagery portal "in accordance with the Administration's directive."¹⁷ The contractor that hosts the portal, Maxar, said that "the U.S. government has decided to temporarily suspend Ukrainian accounts."¹⁷ Whatever one thinks of the decision, the chain worked, with a private operator, a public decision and a public record of who made it. Nineteen months later, in the same war, the same kind of switch was thrown and no one would put a name to it. What failed first in October was accountability, before authority or capability.

The state's answer

The case for the state is strong. The Pentagon argued it should be able to use Anthropic's AI models in any way it deems lawful; Anthropic tried to keep them out of fully autonomous weapons and surveillance of Americans, and the Pentagon designated the company a supply-chain risk.¹⁸ In March a federal judge in California temporarily blocked the designation, writing that "the Department of War could just stop using Claude", and her order left the Pentagon free to move to other AI providers.¹⁸ In a separate case in September, a federal appeals panel in Washington upheld the Defense Department's ban two votes to one, the majority writing that "these restrictions have stopped Claude from performing tasks requested by government users", over a dissent that the law was meant to guard against sabotage by foreign powers.¹⁹ The Pentagon's chief technology officer said that "no private company will insert their opinions in the chain of command", and Anthropic said it was considering further review.¹⁹ Claude, the model that drafted these sentences, is Anthropic's.

Congress has used the purse the same way. In the defense spending bill they released in January 2026, appropriators eliminated $277 million for MILNET, citing the sole-source model, and gave the Space Development Agency $50 million more to keep buying from several vendors.²⁰ In 2022 the Pentagon awarded its enterprise cloud contract to four companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, which compete for its orders.²¹ The Defense Production Act lets the president require priority performance of contracts and allocate "materials, services, and facilities" for national defence.²² Europe chose to build its own constellation, IRIS², under a twelve-year concession to SES, Eutelsat and Hispasat, in the name of "European autonomy".²³ The Commission says IRIS² is "owned and managed by the European Commission" while the consortium is responsible for "building and operating the system".²⁴ On paper that is the arrangement Musk describes for Starshield, which suggests that formal ownership is not what decides who holds the switch. The state can regulate, compel, punish, diversify and build, and it has done each of these.

What the counterarguments share is time. The Pentagon could afford to blacklist one AI company because others existed, and the judge's order assumed it could switch. IRIS² expects its first launch in 2029.²³ In March 2025 Poland's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, whose government pays about $50 million a year for Ukraine's Starlink service, warned that if SpaceX proved "an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers"; Musk answered that "there is no substitute for Starlink."²⁵ One analyst counted about 630 satellites for Eutelsat's OneWeb, then the only other low-orbit option, against more than 7,500 for Starlink, and found Starlink embedded in Ukraine's supply chains, training and applications.²⁶ A launch schedule can absorb a six-month delay. An interceptor drone chasing a jet-powered Shahed cannot absorb a week.

Dependence, then, does not automatically become control. A provider holds power over a state's force in proportion to how long the state would need to replace it, measured against how long the crisis allows. The state's instruments work on the calendar of statutes, budgets and courts; an operator's switch works overnight. The state's leverage over its suppliers is greatest in peacetime, and the supplier's leverage over the state's capability is greatest in war. The monopoly on force may be most open to contest exactly when force is being used.

The monopoly that moved

Weber described what rule looked like before the expropriation. Where the vassal "supplied his own equipment and provisions for war", the lord's power rested "upon a relation of personal faith" and on the fact that the vassal's title to his fief was "derived from the overlord".¹ Both grounds have modern counterparts. A contractor's standing comes from the state's contracts. In October 2026, by the accounts available, a foreign army's satellite links came back after a phone call between a president and the owner of the company that runs the network.⁹ When part of the means belongs to someone in their own right, a command can turn into a request, and its outcome into a matter of relationship.

The legal monopoly on force has not moved. No company claims the right to use force, and none of these cases shows a company commanding a weapon. What has moved is part of the material monopoly that Weber thought essential to a state. The monopoly that matters most in the next war may be over the infrastructure that makes the legal right usable at the speed a war demands, held by whoever operates the networks, launch and computing that cannot be replaced in time.

Four senators have asked SpaceX in writing to describe "the respective technical, contractual, and operational authorities retained by SpaceX and the U.S. government", and its ability to restrict access "during military operations or national security emergencies."⁶ The answers are due on November 2.⁶ If elected officials have to ask a company where the power to stop a military network sits, and if operational power can be concentrated outside elected government, is America still governed democratically in practice?