Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about WGS, what he calls the US military's global geostationary positioning system, and whether other militaries run comparable closed positioning networks. There's a terminology thing we should clear up right at the top, because it actually shapes the whole conversation. WGS is not a positioning system. It's Wideband Global SATCOM — a communications relay network. The positioning system is GPS, totally separate constellation. But the core question is excellent: who else has built sovereign military satellite networks, and how do they compare?
The timing is perfect. WGS-12 just completed on-orbit testing this month — May twenty twenty-six — which means the US now has the most robust dedicated military communications constellation ever fielded. Twelve satellites in geostationary orbit, each one covering about a third of the Earth's surface. Meanwhile, Russia's Blagovest network has four birds up, China's Tiantong has three, and all three countries are racing toward proliferated low-Earth-orbit architectures. This is an orbital arms race most people have never heard of.
An arms race where the weapons are bandwidth and beamforming. So let's start with the thing Daniel actually named. What is WGS, and why does the US need a separate military comms network when we've got Starlink and Intelsat and a thousand commercial providers?
WGS is operated by the US Space Force's Space Systems Command, and it is the backbone of pretty much every American military operation that involves moving data between units that are beyond line of sight. We're talking drone video feeds from a Reaper over Yemen routed to a ground control station in Nevada. We're talking a B-fifty-two Stratofortress receiving updated target coordinates mid-flight over the Pacific. We're talking special operations teams in Africa sending real-time intelligence back to SOCOM headquarters in Florida.
All of that rides on twelve satellites parked twenty-two thousand miles up.
Twelve satellites, each costing about three hundred fifty million dollars to build and launch, total program cost somewhere around four point two billion. Each one handles four point eight seven five gigabits per second of throughput. That's roughly ten times the capacity of the old Defense Satellite Communications System, the DSCS constellation it replaced. But here's the key architectural detail — each WGS satellite uses something called a digital channelizer. It can dynamically split its bandwidth across nineteen separate coverage beams, eight of which are steerable.
One satellite can simultaneously serve a carrier strike group in the South China Sea, an Army brigade in Eastern Europe, and a C-seventeen Globemaster III transiting the Pacific, all without those users interfering with each other.
It's software-defined routing in space. The satellite isn't just a dumb bent pipe bouncing signals back to Earth — it's actively managing who gets what bandwidth, when, and on what frequency. And it's doing this across X-band and Ka-band, which are military-specific frequency allocations. X-band in particular is less susceptible to rain fade than Ku-band, which is what most commercial satellite TV uses, and it's harder to jam because the beams are narrower.
Which gets to the real reason this thing exists. It's not just about having your own satellites. It's about sovereign control over the entire link.
During Operation Iraqi Freedom in two thousand three, the US military tried to lease commercial satellite bandwidth and discovered a fundamental problem — so was everybody else. News organizations, humanitarian groups, other governments. The capacity simply wasn't available at the scale needed, and the commercial providers weren't obligated to prioritize military traffic. Then fast forward to twenty twenty-two, Starlink terminals in Ukraine. SpaceX imposed geographic restrictions on where those terminals could operate, reportedly to prevent their use in offensive operations into Russian-occupied Crimea. Whether you agree with that decision or not, the point is: a commercial provider made a policy decision that directly affected military operations on the ground.
The bandwidth equivalent of "I'm sorry, your call is important to us.
And that's the polite version. The less polite version is: what happens if a commercial satellite operator is headquartered in a country that is actively hostile to US interests, or is subject to diplomatic pressure from a country that is? WGS guarantees that no third party can throttle, deny, or eavesdrop on US military communications. The encryption is NSA Type One. The waveforms are military-specific. The ground stations are on US and allied soil.
Let's talk about those ground stations, because the satellites are just the visible part. What's actually receiving these signals?
The terminal ecosystem is enormous. The US military operates over ten thousand terminals that can talk to WGS. The big one is FAB-T — the Family of Advanced Beyond Line-of-Sight Terminals. These are installed on the nuclear command and control fleet: B-fifty-two bombers, RC-one thirty five reconnaissance aircraft, the E-four and E-six airborne command posts. A single FAB-T terminal costs somewhere between two hundred thousand and two million dollars depending on the configuration.
For a radio.
For a radio that has to survive a nuclear electromagnetic pulse, resist jamming from a near-peer adversary, maintain a link with a satellite twenty-two thousand miles away while the aircraft is maneuvering, and encrypt everything to a standard that even a nation-state can't crack in less than decades. So yes, two million dollars for a radio.
It's the world's most expensive walkie-talkie with the world's best excuse.
The Navy uses something called the Multi-Band Terminal on its destroyers and cruisers. The Army has man-portable units — literally a backpack with a dish antenna — that special operations teams can hump into the field. And all of these terminals are interoperable with allied systems through something called the Allied SATCOM Memorandum of Understanding. A British soldier with a Skynet terminal can route through a US WGS satellite. A French unit with a Syracuse terminal can do the same. It's a federated network.
Which brings us to the other side of Daniel's question. Who else has built this kind of thing?
Let's start with Russia. Their equivalent is called Blagovest — four satellites in geostationary orbit, built by ISS Reshetnev, launched on Proton-M and the newer Angara A5 rockets. The fourth satellite, Kosmos twenty-five fifty-eight, went up on an Angara A5 in October twenty twenty-three. These birds operate in X-band and Ka-band, just like WGS, but the estimated throughput is much lower — maybe one to two gigabits per second per satellite, compared to WGS's four point eight seven five.
A quarter to a half the capacity per bird, and they've got four versus our twelve.
But Russia also operates a separate set of satellites called Luch, sometimes designated Olymp-K, and these are... They're officially relay satellites, but they've been observed maneuvering suspiciously close to other nations' satellites. In twenty fifteen, a Luch satellite parked itself between two Intelsat satellites and just sat there. In twenty eighteen, a Luch approached a French-Italian Athena-Fidus satellite. The working theory is that these are signals intelligence platforms masquerading as communications relays.
The orbital equivalent of "just browsing.
It gets even more interesting. Russia's next-generation SATCOM architecture is called Sfera — a planned constellation of over six hundred satellites across multiple orbits, including LEO, MEO, and GEO. The goal is to have a resilient, multi-layer network that can survive the loss of individual satellites. The first Sfera demonstration satellites launched in twenty twenty-two, but the full constellation is aspirational — Russia's space budget has been squeezed by sanctions and the ongoing war in Ukraine.
What about China?
China's primary military communications constellation is Tiantong — three satellites in geostationary orbit, all based on the DFH-four satellite bus. Tiantong-one zero one launched in twenty sixteen, zero two in twenty twenty, zero three in February twenty twenty-one on a Long March three B. These provide mobile communications for the People's Liberation Army, primarily voice and low-rate data for naval and ground units.
Three satellites covering what geographic area?
Primarily the Asia-Pacific — the first island chain, the South China Sea, the East China Sea. But during the twenty twenty-four Taiwan Strait crisis exercise, Tiantong was used to provide secure communications for PLA naval task forces operating beyond the first island chain, into the Philippine Sea. That was significant because it demonstrated that China can project military communications globally, not just within its immediate neighborhood.
They're not stopping at three.
China also operates the Zhongxing series — Chinasat — for military communications. The newer Chinasat-twenty-six, launched in twenty twenty-three, features advanced anti-jamming and beamforming capabilities. And then there's Guowang — China's answer to Starlink. A planned constellation of thirteen thousand satellites in low Earth orbit, ostensibly for broadband internet, but with obvious military applications. The first Guowang satellites reportedly launched in twenty twenty-four.
Thirteen thousand satellites. That's not a communications network — that's an orbital occupation.
That's exactly how defense analysts are reading it. When you have thirteen thousand satellites in LEO, you've essentially claimed a huge amount of orbital real estate. Anti-satellite weapons become less effective — you can't shoot down thirteen thousand anything. And even if you take out a few dozen, the network routes around the damage.
The strategic logic is shifting from "a few very expensive, very hardened satellites in geostationary orbit" to "a swarm of cheaper satellites in low Earth orbit.
The US is following the same logic. The Space Force's Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA, plans to have over a hundred satellites in LEO by twenty twenty-eight. The first tranche — twenty-eight satellites — launched in twenty twenty-five. These are not WGS replacements. They're a complementary layer. WGS handles high-bandwidth strategic communications from GEO. PWSA handles tactical communications from LEO with lower latency.
Lower latency being the key advantage of LEO. A signal to GEO and back takes about a quarter of a second. To LEO and back, maybe twenty-five milliseconds. For a drone pilot flying a Reaper, that quarter-second matters.
It absolutely matters, especially as the military moves toward more autonomous systems where control loops need to be tight. But GEO has its own advantages. A single GEO satellite covers a third of the planet persistently. A LEO satellite covers a spot a few hundred miles across and then moves on. You need a lot of LEO satellites to provide continuous coverage over a given area, and you need sophisticated handoff mechanisms between satellites.
This isn't GEO versus LEO. It's GEO and LEO, with MEO in the middle for navigation.
And that multi-layer architecture is what every major power is racing to build. Let me give you the NATO picture, because this is where it gets interesting. The UK operates Skynet five — three operational satellites, with Skynet six A launched on a Falcon nine in December twenty twenty-five, replacing Skynet five D. France has Syracuse four, three satellites on the Comsat NG program. Italy has SICRAL two B. Germany has SATCOMBw three. All of these are interoperable with WGS through that Allied SATCOM Memorandum of Understanding I mentioned.
A British soldier in Estonia, a French pilot over Mali, and an American sailor in the Pacific can all talk to each other through different satellites that function as a single network.
The terminal doesn't care whether it's talking to a Skynet satellite or a WGS satellite — it's the same waveform, the same encryption standards, the same routing protocols. It's NATO's quietest and most important interoperability achievement.
The countries that aren't in NATO?
India is an interesting case. They operate GSAT-seven, nicknamed Rukmini, dedicated to the Indian Navy, and GSAT-seven A for the Indian Air Force. Two dedicated military communications satellites. That's it. India's total military SATCOM capacity is roughly five percent of what the US WGS constellation provides. For a country with India's military size and regional ambitions, that's a significant gap.
Two satellites for the world's second-largest standing army.
That's why India has been aggressively leasing commercial capacity and is planning additional military satellites. But the gap between the US and everyone else is staggering. The US operates twelve WGS satellites plus six AEHF — Advanced Extremely High Frequency — protected communications satellites. AEHF is a whole different beast. These satellites are designed to survive a nuclear war. They use extremely high frequency bands that are virtually impossible to jam, they have onboard processing to route around attacks, and they connect the President to the nuclear forces.
WGS is the workhorse. AEHF is the doomsday backup.
Together, the US military SATCOM capacity exceeds the rest of the world combined by roughly three to one in total throughput. But that lead is shrinking, and the nature of the competition is changing. The Chinese Guowang constellation, the Russian Sfera program — these are attempts to leapfrog the GEO model entirely and go straight to proliferated LEO.
Which changes the vulnerability calculus. A GEO satellite is stationary relative to the ground. You know exactly where it is. A kinetic anti-satellite weapon — a direct-ascent missile, basically — can reach it in a few hours. China demonstrated this in two thousand seven with their ASAT test, and Russia demonstrated it again in twenty twenty-one with a direct-ascent missile that destroyed one of their own defunct satellites.
Both tests created enormous debris fields that are still up there, threatening everything else in orbit. But the point stands: a few very expensive GEO satellites are vulnerable to a determined adversary with ASAT capability. A hundred LEO satellites? Effectively impossible to take down completely.
The missile defense problem in reverse. You can intercept one warhead, maybe ten. You cannot intercept ten thousand.
That's the logic driving PWSA, Guowang, and Sfera. It's not just about bandwidth or latency. It's about resilience through proliferation.
Let's pull back and address the second part of what Daniel was asking — the positioning piece. He called WGS a positioning system, which it isn't, but the question stands: do other militaries operate closed or encrypted positioning networks comparable to GPS?
The answer is: sort of, but not in the way most people think. GPS itself has a military-specific signal called M-code. It's encrypted, it's more resistant to jamming, and it's broadcast on a separate frequency from the civilian signals. Only US and authorized allied military receivers can use it. So in a sense, the US already operates a closed military positioning network — it's just layered on top of the civilian GPS constellation rather than being a separate set of satellites.
The other global navigation satellite systems?
Galileo, the European system, has something called the Public Regulated Service — PRS. It's an encrypted signal for government-authorized users, including military and emergency services. It's designed to remain available even when the civilian Galileo signals are jammed or degraded. Galileo went fully operational in twenty sixteen, and PRS has been available since twenty nineteen.
Europe has its own encrypted military-grade positioning signal, on its own satellites, under its own sovereign control.
That was a deliberate strategic choice. Europe watched the US selectively degrade civilian GPS signals during the Iraq War — it's called selective availability, and it was turned off permanently in two thousand, but the memory lingered. The Europeans decided they didn't want their critical infrastructure dependent on a system controlled by the US Department of Defense.
Which is a perfectly rational position, even for allies.
Russia operates GLONASS, which also has a military encrypted signal. GLONASS has been fully operational since twenty eleven, and unlike GPS, it was designed from the start as a dual-use system with equal emphasis on military and civilian applications. The military signal uses a different modulation scheme and is encrypted.
Thirty-plus satellites, fully global since twenty twenty, and it has a military encrypted service that the PLA uses extensively. BeiDou is interesting because it has a two-way messaging capability that GPS and Galileo lack. A BeiDou terminal can send a short message back to the satellite. That means a PLA soldier in the field can transmit their position without needing a separate communications link.
Which blurs the line between positioning and communications. If I can send my coordinates through the navigation satellite itself, I don't need a separate SATCOM link for that function.
That's exactly why BeiDou was designed that way. It's a force multiplier for a military that expects to operate in environments where traditional communications might be jammed or unavailable. China has been very deliberate about building dual-use capabilities into what looks like a civilian navigation system.
What about regional systems?
India's NavIC — Navigation with Indian Constellation — is a regional system with seven satellites, covering India and about fifteen hundred kilometers beyond its borders. It provides a restricted service for military users that's encrypted and more accurate than the civilian signal. Japan's QZSS — Quasi-Zenith Satellite System — is primarily an augmentation to GPS, improving accuracy over Japan, but it also has an encrypted signal for government use. Neither is a fully independent global military positioning network, but both provide sovereign backup if GPS were to be degraded in their regions.
The landscape looks like this: the US has GPS with M-code, plus WGS for communications. Russia has GLONASS with military signal, plus Blagovest for communications. China has BeiDou with military signal, plus Tiantong and Zhongxing for communications. Europe has Galileo with PRS, but relies on member-state SATCOM for communications. India, Japan, and others have regional systems that provide some sovereign capability but aren't fully independent.
That's before we get into the LEO layer that's coming. The next five years are going to transform this landscape completely. The US PWSA, China's Guowang, Russia's Sfera — these are all attempts to build a communications layer that is simultaneously more capable and more survivable than anything that currently exists.
Let's talk about what happens when these systems are actually contested. You mentioned the SATCOM kill chain earlier.
This is where the strategic implications get concrete. Every major military power now understands that satellite communications are existential infrastructure. If you lose SATCOM, your drones go blind, your ships lose coordination, your special operations teams go silent, your precision-guided munitions lose mid-course updates. So the opening phase of any future conflict between near-peer adversaries will almost certainly include attacks on satellite communications.
Those attacks come in layers.
Layer one is jamming. You broadcast noise on the same frequencies the enemy's satellites use, and the receivers on the ground can't pick out the signal from the interference. This is relatively easy to do against commercial satellites. It's much harder against military satellites that use narrow beams, frequency hopping, and spread-spectrum waveforms. WGS and AEHF are specifically designed to resist jamming.
Layer two is cyber. You go after the ground stations, the telemetry and control links, the network operations centers. You don't need to touch the satellite if you can compromise the computers that tell it what to do.
Layer three is kinetic. Direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital ASAT weapons — satellites that rendezvous with other satellites and disable them — or even ground-based lasers that can blind optical sensors. The US, Russia, China, and India have all demonstrated ASAT capability.
The side that wins the SATCOM fight wins the information war. And the side that wins the information war probably wins the shooting war.
That's the consensus among defense analysts. It's why the US Space Force was created as a separate service in twenty nineteen. It's why China stood up the PLA Strategic Support Force, which integrates space, cyber, and electronic warfare. It's why Russia has been investing so heavily in electronic warfare systems like Krasukha-four, which is designed to jam satellite communications and airborne radars.
It's why the proliferation model — a hundred small satellites instead of four big ones — is so compelling. You can jam one satellite. You can shoot down one satellite. You cannot jam or shoot down a hundred satellites distributed across multiple orbital planes without expending an enormous amount of resources and revealing your own capabilities in the process.
There's a historical analogy here. The US Navy learned in World War Two that a few large battleships were vulnerable to air attack. The response wasn't to build bigger battleships — it was to build aircraft carriers and distribute air power across many platforms. The same logic is now being applied to military satellites. The battleship era of SATCOM — a few large, expensive GEO satellites — is giving way to the carrier era of proliferated LEO constellations.
The difference being that in space, the battleships and the carriers will coexist. GEO isn't going away. It's too useful for broadcast applications, for persistent coverage of a specific region, for strategic communications where you need a guaranteed link that doesn't require handoffs between satellites.
There's another factor that doesn't get enough attention. GEO satellites are simpler to use from the ground. A terminal pointed at a GEO satellite doesn't need to track the satellite across the sky — it's stationary. That means simpler, cheaper, more reliable terminals. For a special operations team carrying everything on their backs, a terminal that doesn't need a motorized tracking mount is a significant advantage.
The future is hybrid. GEO for strategic, broadcast, and low-complexity applications. LEO for tactical, low-latency, and resilient applications. MEO for navigation. And all of it hardened, encrypted, and sovereign-controlled.
All of it increasingly contested. The quiet orbital arms race that Daniel's question opens up is one of the most consequential strategic developments of this century, and it's happening almost entirely out of public view.
Most people know about Starlink. Almost nobody knows about WGS, or Tiantong, or Blagovest.
Which is exactly how the militaries want it. These systems are designed to be invisible infrastructure — working so reliably in the background that nobody thinks about them until they fail.
If they fail during a conflict, it's already too late.
The sobering reality is that the next major conflict will almost certainly begin not with airstrikes or ground invasions, but with attacks on satellite communications. Jamming, cyber intrusions, and potentially kinetic strikes on GEO assets. The side with the more resilient, more diverse, more proliferated satellite architecture will have a decisive advantage before the first shot is fired in the traditional sense.
Which is why Daniel's question about who else has these networks is really a question about who can fight a modern war and who can't. If you're dependent on commercial satellite bandwidth, or on a foreign power's military constellation, you're not a fully sovereign military actor.
That's the threshold. Can you communicate, navigate, and target without relying on anyone else's satellites? The US can. China increasingly can. Russia can, though with less capacity. Europe collectively can, though it depends on US interoperability. India is building toward it. Most other nations cannot.
The sovereign SATCOM club is small, and the barriers to entry are enormous. A single WGS-class satellite costs three hundred fifty million dollars. A full constellation costs billions, plus the launch costs, plus the ground segment, plus the terminals, plus the ongoing operations and maintenance. That's before you even get to the encryption and hardening.
The technical expertise required is equally daunting. There are maybe a dozen companies on Earth that can build a military-grade geostationary communications satellite. Boeing builds WGS. ISS Reshetnev builds Blagovest. Thales Alenia Space builds Syracuse and SICRAL. Airbus builds Skynet. The Chinese Academy of Space Technology builds Tiantong. It's a very small club.
What's the next thing to watch in this space? If someone's following this and wants to know what matters in the next couple of years?
One, watch the PWSA launches. The US Space Force's transition from a handful of GEO satellites to a proliferated LEO architecture is the biggest shift in military SATCOM since the sixties. Two, watch Guowang. If China starts launching hundreds of satellites per year for that constellation, it changes the orbital landscape permanently. Three, watch for the first confirmed cyber attack on a military satellite network. It hasn't happened publicly yet, but every major power is developing the capability, and it's only a matter of time.
The first cyber attack on a military satellite will be the Pearl Harbor of space warfare. Nobody will see it coming, and it will change everything.
That's why sovereign military satellite networks matter. They are the invisible backbone of modern military power. The prompt asked whether other militaries have comparable closed networks. The answer is yes — but "comparable" is doing a lot of work. The US has a massive lead in capacity and resilience, China is closing the gap fastest, Russia is maintaining capability despite economic constraints, and Europe has built a federated model that works for a coalition. The rest of the world is watching, and the scramble to build sovereign SATCOM capability is accelerating.
The positioning piece — the encrypted military signals on GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou — means that the navigation side is actually more evenly distributed than the communications side. Multiple powers have global encrypted positioning. Very few have global military communications at WGS scale.
Which is a fascinating asymmetry. Navigation is more evenly distributed. Communications is heavily concentrated. And communications is arguably more important — knowing where you are doesn't help if you can't tell anyone.
To wrap this around to the core insight: sovereign military satellite networks are not optional. They are existential infrastructure. Any nation that relies on commercial or allied SATCOM for critical military operations has accepted a single point of failure that an adversary can exploit through diplomatic pressure, cyber attack, or kinetic action. The question isn't whether you need your own satellites. The question is how many, in what orbits, and how well you can protect them.
The answer to that question, right now, is that the US operates the most capable constellation ever fielded, but the gap is closing, and the nature of the competition is shifting from a few big satellites to swarms of smaller ones. The next decade will determine whether the GEO model persists or whether proliferated LEO becomes the new standard for military communications.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the seventeen eighties, Edo-period sumptuary laws restricted commoners from wearing certain shades of red, but clever merchants exploited a loophole by lining their garments with forbidden crimson fabric — invisible to inspectors but present against the skin. Surviving merchant ledgers from the period record the practice as "kakure-aka," or hidden red, a small act of sartorial defiance preserved in a single textile merchant's account book from seventeen eighty-three.
...right.
Very on-brand for a clothing loophole.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it genuinely helps other people find the show. We're back next week with another prompt, another deep dive, and another fact from Hilbert that nobody asked for.
