Bryan Clark
Senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at Hudson Institute, working on naval operations, electronic warfare, autonomous sy...
“There's so much dependence on Starshield for a lot of these robotic and autonomous systems we've deployed. We're fielding all these forces, including in CENTCOM, where that's the only comms network you've got available to you. And to have that be dependent upon whatever Elon wants to do that day is not a tenable situation. So they're going to have to make them spin it off and create a subsidiary that's managed differently than under SpaceX overall.”
ChinaTalk · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
Following a prediction that congressional oversight will force Starshield to be separated from SpaceX, Clark explains how much deployed autonomous systems in the Middle East rely on it as their only communications link.
Transcript
…I think, yeah, there's just going to be so much investigations into who pressed the button, who turned it off. And there's going to be a lot of PMs on the gov side who are going to be happy to point the finger. I was hearing that before the election where people were just openly complaining about
…that goes beyond, I sit here and make budgetary moves for the company, and that he actually has operational control, which means who's going to tell him no when he asks to see something. And I think those are going to be really hard questions that they're going to get asked probably very quickly.
There's so much dependence on Start Shield for a lot of these robotic and autonomous systems we got deployed. We're fielding all these forces, including in CENTCOM, where that's the only comms network that you've got available to you. And to have that be dependent upon whatever Elon wants to do that day is not a tenable situation. So they're going to have to make them spin it off and create a subsidiary that's managed differently than under SpaceX overall. And I think going forward, there's going to be a bunch of changes and probably how the government's going to be able to acquire those services. And I agree, they're probably going to have to come up with different governance structures at SpaceX, kind of like we do with other defense contractors where they have to create subsidiaries that are going to have different rules compared to their commercial counterparts. And Elon's trying to get into mobile, you know, network, mobile broadband networking, taking the boost mobile spectrum that he was able to, I guess, acquire from them and try to do basically space-to-surface sell your telephone service or mobile telephone service. So now that's going to be another potential capability that the DOD might want to use and now has to figure…
I think that's right. I think, too, just stepping back a little bit more broadly, just kind of looking at the defense tech, Neoprimes, the small startups, things like that. One, we saw yesterday, Shield AI did an acquisition of a counter-UAS system, which is interesting because one of their better…
Adam Smith has been as the chair, soon-to-be chair of HASC, right? He's been around for a long time. He's done this before. I think he very much knows the difference between hunting for corruption and bad deals and making sure that he has, I think, been on record of saying he understands the value…
Do you want to spend a little bit of time, Tony Stark about your piece that you recently wrote, The How-To Guide for Staffers? Because I think it's a good lead-in.
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