Europe keeps talking about satcom resilience the way it talks about wine classifications. Lots of confident nouns, impressive heritage, and a quiet assumption that if you say the right words in the right order, physics will nod politely and comply. “Multi-orbit.” “Sovereignty.” “Secure connectivity.” “Strategic autonomy.” The vocabulary is immaculate. The problem is that the electromagnetic spectrum is not a committee member, and it does not care what your programme is called.
In a conflict, satcom does not fail where the industry likes to look. It fails where it is easiest to touch. The first cracks appear in the ground segments that keep those things alive. Orbit is what you sell. The ground is what you lose.
This is a simple reminder that “space” is the moving part of a system whose decisive dependencies are still stubbornly terrestrial. The “network” is a stack of assets and agreements that sit in places with local politics. Satellites may be fast. Everything that makes them useful is slow.
You can see it in the numbers operators publish when they want to sound large. Starlink’s own reporting and network updates describe more than 100 gateway sites in the United States alone, comprising 1,500+ gateway antennas. That’s presented as performance, and it is. But it is also a confession that the system’s reach is underwritten by an enormous terrestrial footprint. Redundancy, yes. Attack surface, also yes. The industry loves the first interpretation. Adversaries adore the second.
OneWeb’s public gateway figure sits around 40 gateways in service and Gen-1 is structurally more dependent on those gateways because it cannot keep traffic in space the way a dense ISL mesh can. That doesn’t make OneWeb “bad.” It makes its ground dependency clearer.
In conflict terms, without in-space rerouting, the system is only as resilient as its gateway footprint, take out or deny access to enough gateways and coverage turns into stranded capacity overhead.
Amazon’s Kuiper, now rebranded in some coverage as “Amazon Leo,” talks about more than 300 ground stations. That’s a terrestrial land grab at hyperscale. It’s also the shape of what the next decade looks like: a ground segment treated like cloud infrastructure because the customer expectation has become “it should work everywhere” and the adversary expectation has become “good, then I can disrupt it everywhere.”
Meanwhile Europe is consolidating its own commercial centre of gravity. SES completed the Intelsat acquisition in July 2025. This is the part where everyone says “synergies” and “scale,” and then tries not to notice that consolidation also produces cleaner diagrams. The more you merge, the fewer entities there are to coordinate, which is nice. It also makes it easier for an adversary to understand where the bones are.
Europe’s institutional response, IRIS², is the explicit admission that a continent does not want its critical connectivity to be a subcontractor line item on someone else’s geopolitical spreadsheet. The Commission awarded the concession contract to SpaceRISE in October 2024. It then signed the concession contract in December 2024, describing a multi-orbital constellation of 290 satellites intended to deliver governmental and commercial connectivity by 2030. This is the part where the word “sovereignty” is used as if it is an RF filter. It is not. It’s a governance posture. The RF still needs to survive.
Now take those facts and stop viewing them as market trivia. Treat them as the opening pages of a conflict playbook, because that’s what they are. The playbook doesn’t start with “someone shoots satellites.” That’s a late-stage escalation path and often strategically unnecessary. The playbook starts with denial techniques that are cheap and scalable. Things you can do while still keeping the diplomatic option of pretending you did nothing.
The first act is terminal pressure, because terminals are where satcom becomes visible and operationally fragile. If you can make the terminal population unreliable, you don’t need to win an orbital war. You win a trust war. Commanders stop relying on the link. Operators stop designing workflows around it. Users start behaving as if connectivity is intermittent, which is exactly what the adversary wants.
Iran’s recent Starlink episode is the modern template in miniature. Reuters reported Iranian efforts to jam or spoof the signal and use fake GPS signals, with terminal tracking part of the picture. You’ll notice the point here is not whether every terminal went dark. The point is that the denial campaign doesn’t need perfection. It needs disruption plus uncertainty. Persistent enough that users begin treating the link as a liability. That is how you turn a connectivity advantage into a behavioural constraint.
Europe should read that as a warning about itself, not as a story about Iran. If you are planning for conflict and your mental model still assumes “connectivity” is a binary state, you are already late. Connectivity becomes a gradient under pressure. The gradient is shaped by RF environment, terminal sophistication, user discipline, and how quickly the operator can ship and deploy mitigation. It is shaped, too, by whether your users can move their terminals without being arrested, shot, or simply geo-located and confiscated.
This is where Europe’s choices stop being ideological and start being operational. If Europe leans heavily on a non-European mega-LEO system for critical use, it buys industrial scale and rapid software adaptation. It also imports a dependency stack that Europe does not control in crisis. The simple reality is that a private company will have its own risk tolerance. That does not mean “don’t use it.” It means you treat it as one component in a posture, not as your posture.
If Europe leans heavily on European operators and sovereign programmes, it buys governance alignment and clearer lines of authority. It also inherits Europe’s structural vulnerabilities: dense geography, politically fragmented infrastructure ownership, and a regulatory environment optimised for economic fairness and process rather than for rapid adaptation under fire. Europe has extraordinary engineering and extraordinary rules. The adversary does not respect either.
This is where the ground segment returns as the central fact. You can lose terminals and still operate if your operational doctrine assumes terminal attrition and you can replace. You can lose gateways and still operate if your architecture and routing allow graceful degradation, and if you have geographic diversity and alternative breakout points. You lose both when you combine gateway dependency with a terminal ecosystem that cannot survive jamming, spoofing, or interdiction.
The second act is gateway shaping, and this is where Europe’s own nervous system becomes a vulnerability. Gateways do not need to be destroyed to be neutralised. They can be shaped through attacks on backhaul, attacks on power, cyber compromise, or even “unexpected” inspections and administrative paralysis in just the right places. Conflict does not always arrive wearing camouflage. Sometimes it arrives wearing a clipboard.
Europe is especially exposed to gateway shaping because its infrastructure is cross-border by design. In peacetime that interdependence is a strength. In conflict, it is a propagation mechanism. An outage in one jurisdiction becomes a performance problem in another. A regulatory bottleneck in one country becomes a deployment bottleneck for everyone. A successful cyber intrusion into a key NOC environment doesn’t need to be catastrophic to be strategically useful.
This is also where consolidation becomes double-edged. SES absorbing Intelsat creates scale and negotiating power, which is exactly what Europe wants commercially. But a concentrated multi-orbit powerhouse is also a concentrated set of critical dependencies. You don’t have to believe in Hollywood sabotage scenarios to see the logic. If you were designing a denial campaign, you would prefer to spend effort on systems where each incremental disruption produces broad ripple effects. Consolidation creates those ripples. That’s the trade. You either accept it and harden accordingly, or you pretend it doesn’t exist and then act shocked when it becomes relevant.
The third act is spectrum dominance as a local condition. Europe often talks about “secure connectivity” as if it is a property of the satellite system. In reality it is a property of the local electromagnetic environment and the terminal’s ability to function within it. Anti-jam is not a feature. It is a constant arms race between waveform sophistication, antenna patterns, power budgets, and adversary proximity.
Europe’s practical vulnerability here is not that it lacks smart people. It is that it has too many systems that were procured under peacetime assumptions. Many “secure” satcom deployments are secure in the cryptographic sense, but brittle in the RF sense. They assume GPS is trustworthy, interference is accidental, and the terminal will be deployed in a cooperative spectrum environment. That’s not conflict.
A credible European conflict posture therefore requires a terminal strategy that is treated like an ammunition strategy. You don’t plan to deploy a few exquisite terminals and then pray. You plan for volume, distribution, and replacement. You plan for terminals that can tolerate spoofed PNT signals, that can operate with reduced reliance on GPS, that can authenticate properly, that can maintain link under interference through antenna gain, sidelobe control, waveform choices, and operator training. You plan for operational emission control, relocation practices, concealment, and disciplined use patterns that reduce the ease of terminal hunting.
This is where the military angle matters, and it matters in a way that is easily misunderstood. Military terminals and gateways are not magical. They are simply built by people who assume that someone is trying to break them, and who budget accordingly. That translates into higher gain, more robust waveforms, better authentication, better filtering, and in many cases better doctrine around mobility and redundancy. It buys time. It buys degraded service instead of dead service. It buys enough coherence to continue operating while the environment becomes hostile.
Europe’s challenge is that it has to bridge two worlds. It needs military-grade survivability for governmental and defence use. It also needs mass-deployable capacity for the messy “whole-of-society” use cases that show up the moment you realise wars now include social control, information control, and economic disruption.
This is exactly why programmes like IRIS² exist, and exactly why they are not a solution by themselves. IRIS² is governance control plus an architectural direction. It does not automatically create hardened gateways, mobile ground segments, terminal stockpiles, or contested-spectrum operating doctrine. Those are choices Europe has to make and fund. Sovereignty is not the end state. It is the moment you become responsible for the ugly parts you previously outsourced.
The fourth act is industrial attrition and restoration tempo, which is where Europe often loses on inertia even when it wins on design. Conflict produces loss. Terminals get seized. Terminals get destroyed. Gateways lose backhaul. Power feeds fail. A network under pressure needs spare capacity and spare hardware the way a ship under fire needs pumps and patch kits. It’s not a metaphor. It’s the same logic.
Here is where Europe’s industrial storyline becomes relevant again. Eutelsat’s contract for 340 additional OneWeb satellites, combined with a previous 100 ordered in December 2024 for a total of 440, is explicitly positioned as continuity and bridge capacity while Europe’s sovereign programme matures. That is an admission that resilience is time-based. You need something that works now, something that can be sustained through attrition, and something that becomes available later as a sovereign backbone. The satellite order is part of the time-buying mechanism.
But satellites are not the short-cycle consumable. Terminals are. Gateways are. Spares are. Trucks and installers are. Firmware updates are. If Europe wants to impress anyone who thinks about conflict professionally, it should talk less about orbital architecture and more about how quickly can Europe replace or redeploy terminals at scale, how quickly can it shift traffic across alternative breakouts, how quickly can it restore degraded gateway regions, how quickly can it adapt waveforms or operating parameters in response to jamming, and how quickly can it do all this across multiple jurisdictions without becoming hostage to its own process.
This is where the European playbook becomes specific. The first operational requirement is not a new constellation. It’s a layered posture that assumes denial will be local and persistent. You build for graceful degradation and rapid restoration, not for perfect continuity. That means multi-path routing across providers, multi-band strategies that let you shift between different frequency vulnerabilities, and terminal diversity that avoids a single device class becoming a single point of failure. It means keeping capacity in reserve for surge and restoration, rather than selling everything to 95% utilisation because spreadsheets are allergic to slack.
The second operational requirement is geographic diversity that is real, not rhetorical. It is easy to say “distributed.” It is harder to design distribution so that it does not collapse under disruption. European infrastructure is correlated by proximity and by interconnected policy. If you place your critical gateways and NOCs in predictable clusters, you are optimising for peacetime efficiency. If you place them with correlated failure in mind, you are optimising for conflict survivability. Those two optimisations fight each other. Europe must decide which one matters when it matters.
The third operational requirement is a terminal doctrine that treats the terminal population as both an asset and a liability. In conflict, terminals are emitters that can be found. The temptation in Europe will be to pretend this is solved by encryption and legality. It is not. It is solved by when to transmit, where to transmit, how to relocate, how to conceal, how to discipline user behaviour. If Europe is serious, it will train its users the way militaries train radio operators, even if the users are civil responders and infrastructure operators rather than soldiers. Secure connectivity is a behaviour.
The fourth operational requirement is accepting that the spectrum will be contested and planning accordingly. That includes procurement choices that prioritise anti-jam properties for critical users, but it also includes accepting that mass-market terminals will remain more vulnerable. The solution is building a layered system where consumer terminals provide volume, military-grade terminals provide assured links for critical command and control, and the architecture allows traffic to shift between them without collapsing. Quantity provides resilience through scale; sophistication provides resilience through survivability. Europe needs both.
The fifth operational requirement is that Europe has to stop thinking of logistics as a commercial afterthought. If you cannot get terminals across borders quickly, if you cannot pre-position spares, if you cannot swap compromised devices, if you cannot repair and redeploy within days, then your resilience posture is a paper exercise. The enemy will not wait for your tender process. The spectrum certainly won’t.
This is the point where Europe’s favourite instinct appears: coordination. Coordination is valuable and also not a substitute for design. Europe can coordinate itself into paralysis if it confuses harmonisation with tempo. In a conflict, the primary virtue is time. You don’t win by being correct. You win by still functioning while being attacked.
So what does all this “place” Europe as, in the cold view?
Europe is not weak because it lacks satellites. It is vulnerable because of terminals that can be disrupted locally, gateways that can be shaped politically and physically, backhaul that can be cut, power that can fail, restoration that can slow under process, and a cultural habit of treating jamming as an incident rather than as an operating condition.
Europe is also unusually well positioned if it chooses to behave like a serious actor. It has major commercial operators with multi-orbit reach. It has an institutional programme explicitly designed to give it control over critical connectivity. It has industrial capability for constellation replenishment and continuity bridging. It has the regulatory capacity to harmonise spectrum and deployment if it decides speed is part of security, not a threat to it.
The question is whether Europe will keep speaking about resilience as an attribute of orbit, or whether it will speak about it as a property of operations. Because in the modern denial environment, your satcom system is a full-stack contest between your ability to keep receivers hearing whispers from space and the adversary’s ability to make them hear screams from nearby.
Orbit is impressive. The ground is decisive. The terminal population is where denial becomes real. The programme name is where people go to feel safe.
If Europe wants a conflict playbook that holds up under pressure, it has to build diversity, mobility, stock, tempo, training, and the honest assumption that the spectrum will be hostile and the ground will be touched.
That’s not romantic. It’s just how networks survive.
And yes, it does mean the duck needs armour, legs, and a supply chain, because paperwork alone does not frighten a jammer.
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