Executive Summary

Defense-as-a-Service (DaaS) involves military capability being provided as a contracted service by private companies rather than the military owning equipment outright. Its champions argue DaaS offers a silver bullet to address certain challenges of the moment: cost, speed, and technological evolution. Military experience suggests contracted capability is often a poor substitute for sovereign capability.

This brief will introduce the concept of DaaS, examine its track record in military history, and propose alternative solutions for addressing capability challenges without outsourcing sovereign capability. The historical track record of DaaS is ambivalent, recent examples suggest it will trend more to its negative type, and there are ample solutions which may provide the same increases to effectiveness and economies to public cost without surrendering public sovereignty.

What is DaaS?

Defence and Security Equipment International writes “Broadly speaking, as-a-service for defence, commonly referred to as DaaS, involves capability (hardware or software) being provided to the armed forces as an on-demand, contracted service from companies – rather than the military buying and owning the equipment in its entirety.” The model relies heavily on software licensing as a template, and its advocates trumpet a wide variety of supposed benefits from their pulpit. DaaS will bring capability faster and cheaper, will speed the cycle of adaptation to requirements and realities on the ground. User militaries will pay “only for services needed” and won’t “have to find the human resources to support the capability” themselves. DaaS devotees point to SpaceX (orbital lift), Starlink (C3), and Metrea (refueling-as-a-service) as success stories. 

The Past and Present of DaaS on the Battlefield

There are significant flaws in the pitch of DaaS as a silver bullet, first and foremost they are often short on more than anecdotal evidence. We can’t blame devotees of the theory for this shortfall, as decisive outcomes would be difficult to prove – noting the massive impact of Starlink in Ukraine, for example, says more about the enabling power of resilient communication systems than it does whether what’s provided is qualitatively better than a sovereign capability. We would be hard-pressed to make a judgement call one way or another if DaaS were the ground-breaking, innovative concept its portrayed to be. 

Luckily for those wishing to get to the bottom of the question of DaaS’ efficacy as policy, it’s not new.

An emphasis on totally sovereign military forces and capabilities is a fairly recent development, with most researchers pointing to the French Revolution as the decisive turning point. Before the romantic ideal of the citizen-soldier, polities employed large numbers of professional, volunteer, or expatriate/exile soldiers to bolster their capabilities. Foreigners enabled mass by opening up access to personnel beyond the means of the home front. Foreigners enabled empires to deploy new capabilities – such as naval, indirect fire, or special forces elements – by hiring those experts directly into a force before a campaigning season. Even after the French Revolution, these practices persist. Israel relied heavily on foreign volunteers during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War to provide training and initial leadership to its armored, air, and naval units. Blackwater bolstered American security capabilities in operations across the theaters of the Global War on Terrorism.

We should therefore be able to use military history, recent and distant, as a lens to examine the dynamics which returning to DaaS will unearth in the future. Will DaaS result in a better product than sovereign capability?  

Master and Commander: Who’s in Charge?

In summer 2022, Ukraine launched its first big counterattack to roll back the Russian invasion on its eastern frontier. Its military planners envisioned an enveloping attack in Kherson, enabled by the information dominance and precision weapons it had received and fielded from western allies. Among this influx of kit were Starlink terminals, courtesy of US and Polish contracting with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. These terminals would enable Ukrainian civil and military command, control, communications, and intelligence activities (C4ISR generally) during the high-risk, high-reward maneuver against a larger aggressor. Or so Ukrainian planners thought.

In the event, over 100 Starlink terminals went offline in the targeted region during the offensive. Commanders could no longer locate and coordinate their units with confidence. Essential artillery cover broke down as the drones essential to precision could no longer serve as spotters. The Ukrainians advanced but the envelopment failed, ensuring Russian formations would live to fight another day. In 2025, Reuters spoke to SpaceX sources who said the decision to cut off the coverage was taken personally by Elon Musk. This revelation came on the heels of a scandal involving an abortive drone strike on the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, when a fleet of Starlink-enabled drones floundered and self-destructed when they lost their terminal connections. This failure was chalked up not to sabotage, but rather to a misunderstanding about coverage guaranteed under Starlink’s Terms of Services. This is somewhat undermined by statements in February 2023 from Starlink’s COO that “we didn’t think about it” being used in offensive operations but “we learned pretty quickly”. Not that the Russians have had it all their way with SpaceX customer support. The Ukrainian government did succeed in pressuring the company to block unregistered Starlink platforms, sending Russian units using such ‘grey’ terminals into disarray mid-offensive early in 2026. 

The Cold War saw its share of similar issues. In his insightful study of the siege of Dien Bien Phu, Bernard Fall highlights how the French Army sought to create an airborne “hedgehog” as bait for the Viet Minh at the edge of its operational range. There was considerable confidence in this scheme, despite a debacle with a similar hedgehog earlier in the war and a crippling shortage of transport aircraft. To make good this shortfall, French military leaders had contracted with Air France and the Civil Air Transport Corporation (CAT), employing mainly American pilots, to bolster both aircrew and airframes to ensure the viability of the exposed position.

Much of the planning assumptions underlying the Dien Bien Phu operation turned to dust almost immediately in the face of determined Viet Minh siege operations. Aerial resupply as-a-service proved no exception to this rule. The threat civilian crews would insist on the letter of their contracts rather than day-to-day military necessity hung over the entire enterprise from the moment Vietnamese heavy anti-aircraft weapons dominated the base’s airfield. At times, the crews refused to fly without increased ground attack cover – always in scarcity during the war – or at the low altitudes necessary to make supply drops effective. At times, the American crews withdrew and took with them their larger C-119 Flying Boxcars, a heavy lift capability the French had contracted rather than acquire and develop organically. Toward the end of the battle, the French and American civilian crews refused to fly altogether, dooming the (admittedly quixotic) relief mission “Condor” and with it the hedgehog itself. One cannot blame the crews. Few jobs are worth dying for and up to the moment of their refusal they had done all that could be asked of them and more. Regardless, the French decision to plan and execute an operation where much of the critical capability was contracted rather than organic to their forces helped ensure operational defeat and strategic catastrophe.

Nor do we find problems with DaaS only in modernity. The Renaissance also provides instructive examples. 

The infamous condottieri who served Italian city-states in their unending micro-wars were notorious for their keen understanding that, when they were all contractors, they had little incentive to fight every engagement to a decisive finish. The mercenary company opposite, and their employers, were enemies today but prospective partners tomorrow, and decisive battles risked much in the way of the companies’ human and materiel property. Much better if advantage could be demonstrated positionally and the opposition would concede the match in exchange for a graceful retreat. Machiavelli offered a full-throated indictment of the idea they gave faithful and effective service to a sovereign in “The Prince”. 

This ambivalence held true on sea as on land. Genoan admirals Andrea Doria and his grandson Giovanni Andrea Doria were infamous within the Papacy and the Venetian Republic for their often-half-hearted participation in the various Holy Leagues formed to oppose Ottoman domination of the Mediterranean. The King of Spain appointed them leaders of his national fleet in the area, but they also contracted for their personal galleys to make up a sizable chunk of that fleet as a service to the king. This led to considerable consternation when the Dorias were unwilling to risk their assets in decisive engagements. Their objectives were to oppose the Ottomans and maintain political ties (especially with the Papacy, who subsidized the Spanish fleet), but the Dorias personal interests aligned with only one of those conflicting goals. It took Phillip’s bolder bastard brother, Don Juan of Austria, to bulldoze Giovanni’s self-interest and force the decisive victory at Lepanto. 

Marketing Tweets Sink Ships: Outsourcing Operational Security

Operational security is absolutely critical to military operations. This may be especially true today, when speed of communication dramatically increases an enemy’s ability to capitalize on any breach. Soldiers have it driven into their brain from Day 1 that discretion is key and lapses get people killed. They are subject to harsh military judgement and are defended by Judge Advocates General, appointed by the service, when they make mistakes. These facts create a culture and atmosphere which their civilian counterparts have largely adopted as their own. This culture is antithetical to the private sector which values above all else buzz, deregulation, and an army of lawyers on retainer. Against this “laissez-faire” backdrop, DaaS has a history of mixing the needs of business and defense in a way that risks soldiers’ lives.

Bernard Fall documented how DaaS contributed to casualties and failure entirely by accident in Vietnam. As previously shown, France substantially augmented its airlift capacity with civilian aircrew during the French-Indochina War. These aircrews were often key for the kind of large-scale, sweeping paratrooper assaults the French counted on to try and match guerilla mobility. This posed two practical issues. First, the aircrews would have to be alerted to an operation in plenty of time to avoid disruption to their “day jobs”. Second, they would have to refresh their knowledge of the formation flying prior to any operation. The tight coordination peculiar to dropping a large number of paratroopers onto a concentrated landing zone were a special skill noted demanded by their regular duties. Both were conspicuous, to the point that the Viet Minh became adept at noting the buzz of activity and shifting their forces, leaving “knock out” blows to slam into empty air.

The Russian Empire suffered a similar vulnerability during the Russo-Japanese War. With the Pacific Fleet sunk and Port Arthur on the verge of succumbing to the siege, Tsar Nicholas II determined that the Baltic Fleet sail around the world to relieve his forces and recoup Russian honor. The problem? Russia lacked the enabling infrastructure to allow for such global reach. The solution? Contract with civilian companies for coaling and resupply across the entire route. Predictably, this made the work of Japanese intelligence child’s play. The contractors did not treat their arrangements with secrecy due the moment, and in any case the remote nature of the route meant that any uptick in commercial activity was easily logged. Japanese Admiral Togo used this intelligence and his expert knowledge of the theater of operations to ensure his ships were at greatest readiness just as the Russians reached their greatest extremity, resulting in the lopsided route that was Tsushima. 

Public Money, Private Interest 

As this brief was being prepared for publishing, Starlink reminded analysts and policymakers of one of its more unfortunate tendencies: a rather extortionate approach to its tiers of service and pricing. On May 26, 2026, Reuters reported that Starlink had demanded a five-fold increase in fees for US military’s use of Starlink on LUCAS drones essential to the campaign against Iran. Experts won’t fail to notice that Starlink’s convenient timing – waiting to raise an issue with use and pricing until almost two months into a tough, costly conflict – mirrors the fait accompli with which they prevented the Pentagon in 2022. Despite capitalizing on its “charity” in providing Starlink for public relations and capital funding, Starlink demanded additional monies for services already paid for by Poland, USAID, and other entities. The pricing was opaque, though it would amount to an additional approximately $400 million over the next year, but the US government had no alternative to paying given the disruption loss of service would have for the Ukrainians at the height of the fighting season It’s also worth noting that Musk’s brief tenure operating the infamous DOGE gutting of US sovereign capability across the board further increased US civil and military reliance on Starlink throughout spring and summer 2025. Amritha Jayanti summed up the problem well for Harvard’s Belfer Center when she wrote that Starlink clearly demonstrated how “The incentives, operating principles, and accountability mechanisms for the private sector differ from the public sector…”. Those differences have unambiguous costs in both taxpayer dollars and, potentially, the lives of Ukrainian and American soldiers.

Acknowledging Success: The Positives of Starlink and Metrea

For all its many flaws in processes, accountability, and governance, Starlink did provide a clear case study for low-earth orbit satellite connectivity in a crisis. The company responded to a request for service to be “turned on” in the theater of operations within 12 hours with new terminals provided within 48 hours. By May 2022, it had 150,000 regular civilian users and many units had acquired their own terminals. The availability of this technology melded with Ukrainian sovereign capability and public-private partnership to fuel the innovation of engineers embedded in combat units. This added capability was available at a lower per user cost owing to Starlink’s commercial business model anticipating large economies of scale, and Starlink’s support infrastructure meant it had the means and vested interest in responding to strengthen the satellite network against Russian cyberattacks in real-time rather than leaving this to Ukrainian cyberwarfare forces.

Metrea also exhibits many positive aspects of a case study for DaaS. A US-based company offering airborne refueling, intelligence, and firefighting capabilities, they have rapidly evolved their business model in recent years to expand beyond service provision to the US military. In 2024, Metrea supported German participation in the Pacific Skies exercise including on a long-endurance flight. In 2025, the Indian Ministry of Defence contracted Metrea to support air-to-air refueling training for its pilots. In both cases, one sees DaaS as a support to sovereign capability rather than a replacement – Germany does not envision operations in Hawaii as a matter of course, so it would be foolish to acquire the sovereign capability to refuel in that theater for the occasional training opportunity. Metrea has most recently been contracted by Australia to bolster its airborne border surveillance.

Both of these cases offer insight into the appeal of DaaS and the potential public good they can offer to nations who require seasonal, crisis, or stop-gap capabilities. Starlink provided connectivity to a Ukraine facing devastated infrastructure and heavily denied environment during the initial surprise of the Russian invasion. Absent the whims of its fickle and authoritarian chief, it would have been an unambiguous example of a private company filling a gap until a sovereign capability could make good the essential capability. Metrea’s provision of air capabilities related to surveillance, refueling, and firefighting could, for example, allow a nation waiting on refueling capabilities to “train how it will fight” prior to delivery or enable nations facing changing climate threats to ensure the ability to protect civilians while analyzing new adaptation strategies to wildfires going forward.

Alternative Policy Options to DaaS

Proponents of DaaS will point out that no shortfall I’ve mentioned is unique to the private sector. They are quite correct. Communications can fail through sabotage or misuse, soldiers can mutiny without reference to a contract, loose lips have sunk ships since the dawn of time, and no human is free from the impulse of “every man for himself”. All organizations, public or private, struggle to hold themselves and be held accountable. On the positive side, economists have demonstrated that what is called privatization is often just the movement of expertise from public to private service with that expertise then sold back to the public at a premium. It does little for the argument DaaS will be cheaper but offers hope that some soldiers moving out of uniform and into an office will take their values of service and secrecy with them.

I view the challenges I have outlined as particular to the DaaS concept in two ways. 

First, I have already argued that the respective cultures of national defense versus the private sector encourage or discourage bad behavior in different ways. By way of example, I would point to Meta. It sees no contradiction in building a backdoor to its systems for China, lying to Congress about it, then having its CISO serve as a cybersecurity expert as a US Army Colonel – it’s all good business and consistent with Meta’s overriding priority to expand users by whatever means necessary. Second, I would argue that DaaS inserts private interests into areas of public authority in a way which subverts public authorities, interests, and competencies. If Valerii Zaluzhnyi had ordered Starlink turned off in the middle of a Ukrainian offensive (apologies for the Ambassador for deputizing him into my hypothetical), he would have been shot as a traitor. When Elon Musk does it, he is merely a business leader considering what’s best for his company. Arguments that Musk or Starlink are particularly bad actors and that other DaaS arrangements would play out in a more public-spirited way are not systematically convincing. This is far from the first time a misalignment of “incentives, operating principles, and accountability mechanisms” between the public and private sector has been noted as a net negative for citizens. While many good actors in the private sector would and have doubtless rise above these risks and render good service, the systematic risk would remain. 

None of this renders the status quo sufficient or acceptable. I do not agree that start-ups or DaaS are silver bullets to national capability shortfalls, but I acknowledge shortfalls exist and have to be dealt with. Which begs the question: what alternatives would work better?

Return to the Design Bureaus

Certain major military capabilities used to be significantly developed by government design bureaus. First, such an approach would ensure designers and users were on the same team from the word “Go” and would remain so despite the success or failure of a particular project. It would also avoid careful balancing to maintain competency in the industrial base. Everyone knew, for example, that either Boeing would be awarded the contract to build the next American, crewed fighter jet or there would be only one company in the nation left with the capacity to do so. A monopoly by default would have resulted. Under a design bureau approach, the intellectual capital would be held as a public resource and industrial strength, and resilience could be fostered through broad production awards. Taking it a step further, establishing a NATO or EU design bureau would level access to high-end capabilities across wealthy and impecunious members and represent a leap forward in interoperability by checkmating the ability of individual users to mandate quirky incompatibilities in the design phase and industrial players to build “black box” capabilities which build dependencies into capability development plans.

Think Seriously about New Concepts

Strategy is the process of matching your ends, and the ways you will achieve them, to the means at your disposal. All criticisms of the current development and acquisition situation, but especially those of DaaS advocates, fundamentally assume a predictable trend line of the ends and ways of war. They must or else admit the future could demand big, slow, defense primes just as much as it demands quick, light startups or DaaS. Ask generations of Midwestern Americans how well the quick, light mobile home holds up in a tornado – context is always king.

This begs the question: why aren’t we thinking seriously about how to fight our wars differently? Not just in terms of means, but how we shape, frame, and choose our ends. Pathbreaking as Ukraine is in its particulars, the broad strokes would be evident to Eisenhower or Foch – heavy indirect fire, exploitation to go over to the offensive, and plenty of spade work in the meantime. Often innovation or DaaS advocates allege these things go hand in hand – why wouldn’t visionary businesses and processes yield visionary solutions? But fundamental vision must come from public civilian (ends) and military (ways) leaders before anyone has the remotest idea of the means. Economists demonstrate that privatization (see: DaaS) actually dulls this natural instinct in the public sector, encouraging them to see themselves as mere users of the wonders industry provides. We have to imagine a future generation of Grants, Pattons, and Leclercs will appreciate the invitation to do what they were trained for, rather than merely coordinate the vision of a civilian like a Musk.

Obsolescence Risk Guarantee Funds

Our collective expectation of what constitutes customer service’ is a significant come down from the past. Can you imagine our parents or grandparents quietly accepting the stock features in the multi-thousand-dollar car they’d just bought being provided “as a service” with the manufacturer free to turn off heated seats in the absence of the payment of a fee? Why then should we accept that it is perfectly acceptable for defense contractors to charge full price and a maintenance fee for a solution that could be made obsolescent, and returned to cutting edge performance, by something as trifling as a software update? In times of need in the Athenian democracy, wealthy citizens competed to provide the state with the best equipped triremes money could buy. They considered it a sign of their patriotism and citizen pride. No one disputes that any defense contract will make the recipient fabulously wealthy. Perhaps contractors should be compelled to maintain a portion of that wealth against the possibility of early obsolescence or a fundamental change in the business. Insurance companies contribute to state guarantee funds against the risk of policy default in the United States, and they remain extremely lucrative. Something similar could be examined for the defense sector, which shares with insurance a special comingling of public and private interests.

DaaS as a Hedge Against Transformational Bets

There’s merit in every idea, and DaaS has its own. A military which seeks to acquire an arsenal for every minute contingency will fail to adequately prepare for so much as an independence day parade. But, as mentioned above, no one knows for a fact how warfare will trend. Service providers can provide militaries with a hedge against unlucky bets by maintaining and upgrading moth-balled capabilities in harmony with future concepts. Marines fighting in Hue in 1968 found their Cold War-era equipment less effective in the tight confines of a Vietnamese city. Lucky for them, their units retained Korean War-vintage weapons which proved better suited to the task: heavy bazookas, 106mm recoilless rifles, flamethrowers, and tear gas launchers. The men hadn’t used the weapons in Vietnam to date and even had to break out the manuals for some, but they nonetheless provided novel capabilities on short notice. Crewed helicopters and Marine tanks could be capabilities which DaaS providers maintain and upgrade for a reasonable expense against the risk of a retro trend in future requirements.

DaaS as a Bridge to Sovereign Capability

 At NATO, I experienced firsthand the pressure nations face in meeting demanding capability targets which are entirely new to their forces on short timelines. DaaS could play a role in mitigating this pressure by serving as a bridge to new capability, allowing a nation’s existing forces and capabilities to train alongside a novel effect and providing greater decision and analysis time to evolve a sovereign concept of operations and acquisition program. Imagine Albania is allocated the equivalent of an armored brigade in a future NATO Defence Planning Process. DaaS could allow them to rapidly rent the training and the capability on-demand, freeing them from the need to wait for allied training facilities to become available, while at the same time allowing the government to consider a wide variety of options to equip the battalion without worrying about the political consequences of seeming unwilling to fill a NATO target. This would be particularly attractive, as discussed in the previous notion, when paired with areas where the user nation is considering novel concepts for achieving effect and require additional time to offer different, sovereign capabilities to meet a target.

Conclusion

DaaS involves capability contracted service from companies rather than the military buying and owning its own equipment. Contemporary examples highlight potential benefits of the approach, but variations on this theme throughout history have proven less than satisfactory from the perspective of availability to commanders and operational security. The current cultural differences between public service and private enterprise make a redemption unlikely to yield a better result. A number of alternatives to DaaS exist and should be prioritized for consideration before outsourcing a sovereign resource and responsibility. These alternatives include: a return to national or international design bureaus, serious exploration of new concepts, changing corporate norms regarding social responsibility, limiting of DaaS to a role in hedging transformational uncertainty, or using DaaS as a bridge to sovereign capability. The opportunity or danger in DaaS hinges on whether it is a temporary support to sovereign capability, like a spotter at the gym helping a comrade to increase their strength, or a replacement for sovereign capability which creates public dependence on private interests.

The use, maintenance, and development of military capability will always be of great cost and of great potential to the publics which maintain them. Anyone who has had an Uber driver cancel their ride on the way to the hospital, their Door Dash arrive with noodles instead of a burger, or seen their local businesses gutted by a monopolistic Amazon will understand how something done “as a service” might be better done oneself. We cannot afford the negative outcomes of the military past or the civilian present in an environment already overwhelmed with uncertainty.

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