Following up on a high-profile opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times calling billionaire Elon Musk a “national security risk,” retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré wondered aloud on MSNBC how the U.S. government allowed itself to be put at the mercy of the billionaire.
With Musk now having the ear of president-elect Donald Trump, Honoré claimed the danger to America from within has reached a new level.
Speaking with “The Weekend” co-host Michael Steele, the man who was widely praised for his leadership in coordinating military relief efforts in gulf states after Hurricane Katrina, listed off the government’s overly extensive reliance on the controversial wealthiest man in the world.
“Elon Musk has already shown us in the Ukraine situation, he is not unconcerned about using that leverage to his advantage against the interests of an ally of the United States, and getting concessions, and getting whatever he thinks that he needs in that scenario. How dangerous is that aspect of this?” host Steele prompted his guest.
“Well, right now, we never want to get into a single source of intelligence, a single source of communication,” the retired general replied. “I don’t know how we got into this mess contracting with one contractor, SpaceX, doing rockets for us as well as controlling communications.”
“There have been many reports and suspects that some of these systems were not optimized to help the Ukrainians,” he continued. ‘We have been dealing in Haiti and the Kenyan forces were only given one Starlink, one Stalink in that fight.”
“So, I don’t know how the U.S. government –– we have the National Reconnaissance Office, we got Space Command, we got NASA,” he detailed. “How in the hell the people in Washington have subjugated our intelligence and our communications to a private company. Why in the hell did we do that? And it is going to get worse, Michael.”