I was a communications specialist in Iraq in 2006, and one of the problems no one likes to talk about was how many tens of millions America spent on just satellite time alone when we were often getting time on satellites that barely worked or didn't even have fuel. We spent about 10 months out of a year there arguing back and forth with the civilian owners of the satellite that much of the Iraq theater depended upon wasn't stable enough to take the electromagnetic 'push' load from everyone it was employed to handle.

You can push a satellite out of its orbit with enough dishes pointed at it, and this damned thing would sometimes flip in space, and then I don't know how they civilian operators would recover it, because it had no fuel for its onboard propulsion to correct itself.

Well, we just had enough of fucking with this thing or its operators one day, and our Lieutenant was like, "Send the fucking thing into the sun."

So we dialed up all the power we could get from every ground terminal we had control over, which was a lot of power on our hub alone, but we could also remote control about 200 other dishes we supported, and that bitch-ass satellite was never heard from again.

A few hundred million dollars spent on that thing plus what it cost to get it up there, and it went bye-bye.

You'd think someone would have ratted the LT out about it, but after 10 months of everyone dealing with this POS, including the field operators who'd even heard about the repetitive problems this thing cause, no one did.

And the civilian owners switched over to a sat that worked and had fuel, and the last 2 months was absolutely lovely. Barely any satellite problems at all.