Chinese defence researchers have run a detailed computer simulation to examine how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might degrade or shut down Starlink connectivity over a Taiwan‑sized battlespace in a future conflict.

The work, published on 5 November in the journal Systems Engineering and Electronics, treats Starlink as a dynamic, resilient mesh rather than a static satellite link and concludes that large‑scale jamming is technically feasible but demands an enormous electronic warfare (EW) effort.​

Beijing’s interest is driven heavily by Starlink’s combat performance in Ukraine, where low‑Earth‑orbit (LEO) connectivity has underpinned command, control and uncrewed systems despite Russian EW pressure.

Chinese analysts fear that, in a Taiwan contingency, Taipei and its partners could lean on a constellation of more than 10,000 LEO satellites that hop frequencies, reroute traffic and maintain links even under hostile conditions. The study therefore aims to understand how Starlink’s advantages could be blunted or neutralised in practice, informing PLA EW and counter‑space planning.​

The researchers highlight that Starlink’s difficulty lies in its constantly shifting geometry rather than any single technical parameter. Satellite orbital planes and ground visibility zones are in continuous motion, so any given user terminal rapidly switches between multiple satellites, creating a moving target set that complicates tracking and interference.

Unlike legacy geostationary systems that can be swamped by overpowering a small number of fixed beams, Starlink’s multi‑satellite, frequency‑agile mesh can route around localised jamming within seconds.​

To deal with this complexity, the Chinese team modelled Starlink as a time‑varying network, integrating satellite orbits, antenna patterns and user terminal link budgets over a Taiwan‑sized area of roughly 13,900 square miles.

The simulation stepped through time and, for each point on the ground, calculated whether a notional Starlink terminal could preserve a usable signal‑to‑interference‑plus‑noise ratio under different jamming patterns.

Because key details of Starlink’s anti‑jamming features remain classified, the authors stress that they relied on open‑source parameters and made conservative assumptions, framing the results as indicative rather than definitive.​

The central conclusion is that any realistic counter‑Starlink concept must be fully distributed rather than based on a few high‑power emitters. The team argues that a dense swarm of airborne jammers—mounted on UAVs, balloons or manned aircraft—would need to form an overlapping electromagnetic “curtain” over the battlespace to deny coverage at scale.

This distributed architecture is intended to match the constellation’s spatial redundancy, ensuring that, wherever a user terminal looks for a satellite, it sees a jammed path rather than a clean one.​

Within the simulation, each jammer broadcasts noise and is equipped with either a wide‑beam antenna for broad but weaker coverage, or a narrow‑beam antenna offering stronger but more precise interference.

Wide beams can blanket larger areas at the cost of power density, while narrow beams demand accurate pointing but can more reliably break individual links. The model explores how combining these patterns in altitude‑layered formations could maximise the probability that Starlink terminals fall inside at least one strong interference lobe at any given time.​

Under baseline assumptions, the study finds that completely suppressing Starlink across Taiwan’s land area would require at least 935 synchronised airborne jamming platforms, not counting reserves or spares. When the jammer transmit power is reduced to cheaper 23 dBW sources and platforms are spaced roughly 3 miles apart, the requirement grows to around 1,000–2,000 drones or similar assets to maintain coverage. The authors caution that these figures could rise further once terrain masking, weather, attrition, and Starlink upgrades are factored into a real‑world campaign.​

Fielding nearly a thousand to two thousand airborne jamming nodes implies a very large, well‑coordinated EW force, even for a major power. The platforms would need robust datalinks, navigation and time synchronisation to maintain coherent jamming patterns while surviving enemy air defences and counter‑EW measures. Sustaining such a swarm over time also demands extensive logistics for airframes, power, spares and maintenance, turning the operation into a major campaign rather than a quick, one‑off strike.​

The researchers acknowledge significant limitations in their model, starting with incomplete knowledge of Starlink’s waveform agility, beam‑forming and on‑board interference mitigation. They note that any future enhancements to terminal antennas, coding schemes or satellite processing could further raise the jammer power or density needed to achieve denial.

External commentators have also pointed out that such blanket jamming across shared frequency bands would likely disrupt civilian 4G/5G and other services in the region, potentially causing wide‑area collateral interference beyond the intended target.​

For Taiwan, the study underlines both the value and vulnerability of LEO satellite connectivity in a high‑end fight. Taipei is already pursuing its own LEO communications network to complement undersea cables, but any design will need strong anti‑jamming features, multi‑orbit diversity and rapid restoration concepts.

For the United States and partners, the findings reinforce the importance of hardening Starlink‑class systems through better encryption, adaptive waveforms, directional terminals, and integration with other space and terrestrial links to complicate adversary jamming plans.​

The Chinese simulation does not show an easy “off switch” for Starlink but instead maps out the considerable EW mass, sophistication and risk required to deny it over Taiwan.

By quantifying that challenge in terms of hundreds to thousands of airborne jammers, the study implicitly highlights how resilient LEO constellations have become as wartime infrastructure and why they now sit at the centre of major‑power competition over the electromagnetic and space domains.​