European and Asian allies would have to start by investing in low-cost launch capabilities. So far they're making approximately zero progress in that area.

The reality is that all US allies except for maybe France no longer have the capability to project power much outside their own territory without active US support. It's not only satellites. They're also missing just about everything else such as logistics, specialized aircraft, air defense, amphibious capabilities, intelligence, etc. With largely stagnant economies there's no way they can sustain the funding necessary to close those gaps unless they join together in closer alliances with each other.

Most European countries (except France and the UK) are not interested in projecting power outside of a fairly narrow geographic area (mostly the European continent and adjacent seas).

These “military starlinks” will be much smaller systems than actual Starlink. The German one plans for 100 satellites.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/airbus-te...

You're right that the launch cost gap is the real barrier. Europe's been talking about sovereign launch capability for years but Ariane 6 still can't compete on cost with SpaceX. I think the more likely path is that smaller nations lease capacity on someone else's constellation rather than building their own. The question is whether that actually solves the dependency problem or just moves it from one provider to another.