Defence Spending: Knowing What You're Doing Is Half The Battle

Prime Minister Mark Carney called it a geopolitical “rupture” in his speech at the World Economic Forum, and our friends at the Gloves Off podcast have been mulling over what Canada’s strategy should be in the volatile world we are now all navigating together.

Faced with a mercurial and declining superpower in the United States, Canada has moved to ramp up our defence capabilities.

As we’ve discussed in recent weeks, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s strategic approach is “variable geometry” — making alliances and deals case by case to serve Canadian interests rather than along historical or values-based lines.

In the context of defence, this has meant recommitting to NATO and partnerships like Five Eyes, major procurement deals (ground vehicles, submarines, icebreakers, F-35s), and deeper ties with allies like Türkiye and Germany.

Variable geometry responds to the world we have, not the one we want. But this responsive strategy often relies on vibes — what looks right or serves immediate needs — without clarity on the long-term effects.

The vibes-based foreign policy has the benefit of flexibility when it comes to things like trade, but in defence, vibes won’t cut it. We are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in submarines, jets, and scientific research that will drive future defence and dual use capabilities.

This week Matthew da Mota, Canadian Shield Institute Research Director for National Security and Emerging Technology, wrote a deep dive into Canada’s history with dual use technology. There are some lessons we can learn from that history to ensure that today’s unprecedented investments deliver real bang for our buck. But we also need to be planning these investments based on what our partners offer, and what our adversaries are capable of.

One thing that makes this tricky is that there are emerging fields like quantum computing and artificial intelligence where the state-of-the-art is moving very fast, and we can’t assess capabilities just by looking at physical infrastructure.

The most decisive weapons in cyber and information operations could be a few 20-year-olds on a shoestring budget going against the most advanced government agencies. A weapon’s impact isn’t always proportional to its cost or size.

But even setting aside those bleeding-edge domains, the problem of defence investment strategy lands hardest in traditional domains — land, sea and air. In Ukraine, drones have transformed warfare: a few hundred dollars worth could hold up an entire column of soldiers for days. But the real shift isn’t “drones,” it’s the innovation and fabrication cycle. It used to take years to develop and deploy new kit, but in Ukraine, new drone innovations make it to the front line in a matter of days. Adaptation and innovation are the decisive advantages.

So how do you decide which investments build that capacity, and where you’ll need to deploy it?

Much of the current defence budget, rightly, will go to long-needed capabilities: rifles, fighter jets, submarines, icebreakers, medical countermeasures. But the real strategic edge is shifting toward speed of iteration and innovation.

Which points to the capability we are underinvesting in.

Our Defence Industrial Strategy suggests a “Build, Partner, or Buy” framework, but before we can figure out what to build and what to buy, we have to assess what’s needed — measuring our own capabilities, those of our partners, and estimating our adversaries’ where it’s hardest to quantify.

Experts in DND and the CAF know this, but we still lack the capacity and knowledge to leverage emerging technology to win future conflicts.

This is where we need to look next. We can’t partner or buy these answers; we have to build the capacity ourselves — enhancing foreign intelligence, developing assessment methods with experts, and creating an environment where strategic, military, and innovative thinking happen in the same place.

The decisive factor in whether Canada’s defence ambitions succeed will be our capacity to collect, assess, and act on knowledge over time. This is the true battlespace that will define all others.