Weirdly self assured article? Still good someone is talking about history but let's not forget that securing the budget for all of this came out of the literal war chest of the US.
Not an Elon fan but FWIW and AFAIK Starlink's usage during the current war in Ukraine is the fully realized DARPA plan of the last private (?) company in a long line providing internet infrastructure since ~ about 1983 when both TCP/IP and Reagan's general privatization efforts slowly started to "take over" and extend the academic internet. All for the purpose of warfare, everything else was extra. Including keeping Licklider and generations of hippies happy / happily designing and building / maintaining the early waves until businesses could take "the formulas" and go from there.
Vint Cerf:
> The earliest demonstration of the triple network Internet was in
July 1977. We had several people involved. In order to link a
mobile packet radio in the Bay Area, Jim Mathis was driving a
van on the San Francisco Bayshore Freeway with a packet radio
system running on an LSI-11. This was connected to a gateway
developed by .i.Internet: history of: Strazisar, Virginia;
Virginia Strazisar at BBN. Ginny was monitoring the gateway and
had artificially adjusted the routing in the system. It went
over the Atlantic via a point-to-point satellite link to Norway
and down to London, by land line, and then back through the
Atlantic Packet Satellite network (SATNET) through a Single
Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) system, which had ground stations in
Etam, West Virginia, Goonhilly Downs England, and Tanum, Sweden.
The German and Italian sites of SATNET hadn't been hooked in
yet. Ginny was responsible for gateways from packet radio to
ARPANET, and from ARPANET to SATNET. Traffic passed from the
mobile unit on the Packet Radio network across the ARPANET over
an internal point-to-point satellite link to University College
London, and then back through the SATNET into the ARPANET again,
and then across the ARPANET to the USC Information Sciences
Institute to one of their DEC KA-10 (ISIC) machines.
> So what we
were simulating was someone in a mobile battlefield environment
going across a continental network, then across an
intercontinental satellite network, and then back into a
wireline network to a major computing resource in national
headquarters. Since the Defense Department was paying for this,
we were looking for demonstrations that would translate to
militarily interesting scenarios. So the packets were traveling
94,000 miles round trip, as opposed to what would have been an
800-mile round trip directly on the ARPANET. We didn't lose a
bit!
https://netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html