| Only if using old school ‘blanket the area’ monopole antennas or if the goal was to cover the entire potential area all at once -but that seems unlikely to be desirable most of the time. Phased arrays and beam steering would allow them to pick and choose the area at will with high resolution - or even specific targets like several hundred airliners at once. Notably, the same things that starlink needs for being able to properly track base stations and communicate at the timescale/numbers it needs, and the tech is widely used in everything from cell phone towers to military. Starlink has it a lot easier due to LEO, but they’re also a private company with a much harder problem and on a shoestring budget compared to a nation state. TDP would be a lot lower if they could get it focused well enough. And it wouldn’t need to be operating all the time - a ‘war’ mode vs sleep mode seems like it would work too. When not jamming, it could be a passive signals intelligence platform. Or build a couple dozen and put in a lower orbit. Not like it would make a dent in China or Russias military budget, or require any tech newer than 20 years old for them. |
Look at this animation[1] for a moment (click the >> or >>> button to speed up) and think about what it would actually take to get "in front" of enough satellites to block out a given geographic region; even just a single city. There are hundreds of satellites in each orbital plane, rapidly cycling through and taking each others' place.
You obviously cannot have counter-satellites in a geosynchronous "position", and you also can't have satellites simply move between greatly different orbits (or phases of existing orbits) willy nilly; The delta-V requirements are just too great. This just isn't a feasible strategy.
[1] https://heavens-above.com/Starlink.aspx