Other Strategic Advantages of Mass Deployed Starships (Part 3 of 3)

March 19, 2025

It’s at least worth noting that the Pentagon is not oblivious to other uses of the fleet. While strategic mobility is the game-changer, Starship’s military applications extend far beyond

Orbital Bombardment: The long-theorized ‘Rods from God’ kinetic weapons — tungsten rods dropped from orbit with the force of a nuclear strike — become viable with Starship’s lift capacity. These weapons could bypass missile defenses and strike targets with hypersonic precision.

Space-Based ISR and Electronic Warfare: A mass fleet of Starships could deploy reconnaissance, communications, and jamming satellites at an unprecedented scale, outpacing enemy ASAT capabilities and maintaining orbital dominance.

Mass Deployment of Autonomous Weapons: Swarms of drones and AI-driven battlefield assets could be deployed instantly to reinforce contested zones or secure key strategic locations before adversaries arrive.

Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) Buster: Starship’s ability to bypass enemy defenses means that U.S. forces could neutralize heavily fortified zones — such as China’s South China Sea installations or Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave — before a war even begins.

That’s before we even start talking about dominating the Solar System. Listen up, Space Force.

Conclusion: The Future of Warfare is Here, and Starship is the Key

Starship isn’t just another breakthrough — it’s a revolution in military affairs. Control of the seas, and later the air, have long defined global power. Now, with Starship, the battlefield is about to shift again, this time to hypersonic global mobility and space-based dominance.

A fleet of Starships makes distance irrelevant, logistics instantaneous, and traditional force projection obsolete. The Pentagon’s current war plans — requiring months-long deployments, vulnerable supply chains, and slow-moving fleets — are on the verge of irrelevance. The ability to drop an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour, to resupply forces in real-time, and to bypass enemy defenses at will, reshapes the calculus of power.

Wars will be won before they even begin. And isn’t that the Holy Grail?

With Starship, the U.S. has the chance to secure an unassailable lead in military mobility, deterrence, and global power projection for at least two generations, maybe longer. If Washington has the foresight to seize it, this will be the moment historians look back on as the dawn of a new Pax Americana, and a new American Century.

Editor’s Notes And Summary

Elon Musk’s vision for a Mars capable spaceship could give the United States the ability to almost instantaneously create and reinforce a whole combat theater anywhere on Earth.

Wars are often won by those who can move the fastest, supply the best, and sustain their forces longest.

Starship negates all the existing logistics timelines. Instead of waiting days or weeks for military assets to arrive by conventional means, forces could be on the ground on the same day as an invasion.

Military Starships break every existing logistical paradigm. A commander in the field wouldn’t have to ration ammunition and supplies based on what can be transported safely through contested territory. Instead, high-tempo operations could be sustained indefinitely, with real-time resupply ensuring maximum combat effectiveness.

The SpaceX Starfactory is designed to build a Starship a day. A fleet of 1,000 Starships could thus be constructed in about three years. Current Starship is designed to lift 100 tons, but Elon has said that he intends to increase that number to 200. That’s a combined 200,000 tons of payload.

Musk’s math suggests a per-launch operational cost of $700,000 once the system reaches economies of scale. But let’s say $2 million is our high-end estimate. To fly a fleet of 1,000 Starships would cost between $700 million and $2 billion per sortie.

Today, NASA spends $4.5 billion to launch just one Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, just one time.

The total weight of a modern U.S. armored division (more accurately these days a heavy mechanized infantry division) is roughly 155,000 tons. All estimates here are approximate, but if we build a fleet of 1,000 Starships, it will only take 775 Starships, with a per-sortie cost of $542,500,000, to transport the kind of American forces that deployed to defeat Saddam Hussein in Operation Desert Storm.

This might very well be cheaper than existing Earth-bound transportation costs, estimated to be between $500 and $900 million – and it wouldn’t take months, it could take only hours to land our forces, human or mechanical, anywhere they were needed.

No other country is even close to developing this capability. With Starship, the U.S. has the chance to secure an unassailable lead in military mobility, deterrence, and global power projection for at least two generations, maybe longer. If Washington has the foresight to seize it, this will be the moment historians look back on as the dawn of a new Pax Americana, and a new American Century.