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A senior commander secretly installed Starlink on a warship to surf social media
A senior commander secretly installed Starlink on a warship to surf social media
Grisel Marrero, a senior commander of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, US Navy was demoted after installing Starlink satellite internet on the warship to access social networks.
The incident occurred in August or September 2023, but some of the information was only released over the weekend.
USS Manchester. Photo: Dvidshub
Investigators say that due to the need to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cyber threats, Internet access on warships is limited. So she and several others paid $2,800 for the Starlink satellite Internet connection system in April 2023, then deployed it on the USS Manchester to have Internet access to access social media, send messages home, check sports scores and watch movies. The Internet is not shared with the sailors.
She even purchased a wireless signal booster during a stop at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to cover the entire ship’s area. To pay the monthly Starlink bill of $1,000, the crew also used a debit card from the Senior Chiefs Association of America.
Marrero named the network Stinky and renamed it after a printer to hide it. She even blocked a suspicious comment from reaching her commanding officer's suggestion box.
In March, at a US court-martial, Marrero was demoted from commander to officer for shirking duty and lying to his superiors.