“Sovereign” Means You Can Blame Someone Local
The way some people use the word “sovereign” lately, you’d think it comes with its own passport and boarding group. Gurpreet Sohal, acting in full Technical Product Manager ceremonial dress, took to LinkedIn to announce the most prestigious version of a customer update: one where 50 people from the UK Government squint at a slide and nod. That’s theater.
They “shared significant progress” at Eutelsat OneWeb’s White City office. Translation: they booked the nice room with the Nespresso machine and managed not to trigger any alarms. The buzzwords were passed around like hors d’oeuvres. Ground infrastructure? Upgraded. Coverage? Expanded. New user terminals? Of course. Capabilities? Just vaguely plural enough to imply something meaningful happened.
Then da bomb “we’ve listened to the market and the geopolitical environment.” Is that code for “we renamed some SKUs and hired someone with MoD on their resume.” Ze geopoliticeul envireunment? You mean the same one where France just bailed out Eutelsat’s balance sheet like a parent cosigning a car loan for a kid with three failed startups and a half-built spreadsheet? That geopolitical environment?
There’s excitement around the UK’s “sovereign space capability,” a phrase that’s legally obligated to appear in every funding request and LinkedIn brag sheet this quarter. It’s the same phrase used by space contractors when they need to secure a round of defense spending without promising uptime, performance under jamming, or what happens when your secure terminal gets dropped down a flight of stairs in Kandahar.
If it sounds like I’m being unfair, here’s the problem: no one in that post names a single measurable outcome. What’s the latency under duress? How many terminals were deployed in the field and survived more than three months? Are you leasing bandwidth from someone else’s bird during peak windows? Where is the backup plan if France decides their sovereignty means putting encryption at the payload level?
And then, the comments.
One colleague steps in with the ceremonial “you did an excellent job” praise, which is required by the LinkedIn Geneva Convention. Another one says it’s great to see OneWeb providing services “direct into MoD”, which raises more questions than it answers. Direct into what? Skynet? An encrypted Wi-Fi hotspot behind an MoD desk in Cheltenham? Is there a fleet deployment or just a pilot quietly under evaluation by someone who hasn’t approved anything more expensive than a desk chair in 18 months?
But the most revealing line is “one step closer to a partially sovereign LEO network.” That “partially” is doing Olympic-level gymnastics. It says what no Eutelsat marketing team ever will: that what governments really want is the illusion of control without the burdens of building and operating their own full stack of satellite infrastructure.
Sovereignty, in this case, means you can point to a PowerPoint slide and tell Parliament, “Don’t worry, we’ve got our own thing,” even if your comms are bouncing off a constellation that needs weekly cash injections, relies on outsourced launch slots, and is five firmware updates behind on the ground terminals. It feels more like configurable dependence, gift-wrapped in diplomatic language.
And yes, Eutelsat’s got momentum, momentum that looks a lot like refinancing, executive reshuffling, and quietly trying to offload integration cost onto government contracts before the real audit comes in. They replaced their CEO this year and barely mentioned the billions in future spend required to keep OneWeb’s aging fleet alive, let alone make it perform competitively.
The real story is buried. What’s the plan for obsolescence?
Are these “new terminals” field-hardened or just newly painted? Can they meet NATO-compliant security profiles, or are we relying on whitepapers and NDAs to cover the gaps? Is there fallback capacity when orbital congestion spikes or solar interference takes a bite out of the beam? None of this shows up, because those are grown-up problems. This was a ribbon-cutting. A progress parade. Just enough buzz to keep the funding cycle humming without inviting actual scrutiny.
If they want to be taken seriously as the backbone of sovereign communications, they should try posting one day about something that failed, got hardened, and now survives in theater conditions.
Until then, “partial sovereignty” is exactly right.
It’s sovereign enough to secure a PO,
not sovereign enough to bet lives on.
SES: Sovereignty With Stock Tickers