Keeping Canada Relevant Through Specialization
Sometime next year, the Royal Canadian Navy will take delivery of its first of two new Joint Support Ships, HMCS Protecteur. The project is about a billion Canadian dollars over its anticipated cost and a decade late. Moreover, the ships that the Protecteur and its companion will replace have long retired.
The problematic programmatics of these joint support ships belie the vital role they will play for the Royal Canadian Navy and Canadian Armed Forces. Primarily an auxiliary oiler and stores replenisher for naval vessels, this class of ships is also designed to provide logistical support for army operations abroad. It can also be employed as a command ship for air, naval, and land units. Whereas most countries would use two, if not three, different classes of vessels to cover these mission sets, Canada has amalgamated them into one class and then only acquired two vessels for its entire navy.
The story of the Protecteur class is indicative of a fundamental dilemma that now confronts Canada’s defense policy. The country has been forced to make ugly compromises in order to retain some capability in the field. Years of underfunding and delayed modernizations have now left the Canadian military facing a severe capability deficit.
Part of the issue involves somewhat unique Canadian factors, such as chronic underfunding of the military, a broken defense procurement system, and competing government industrial and economic objectives. Yet, it also relates to the transformational changes in the military and strategic environment that all NATO allies face. Canada’s dilemma can be traced back to the 1994 White Paper on Defence. This document called on the Canadian Armed Forces to maintain a multipurpose combat-capable force in order to “manage a full spectrum of conflict” and make a “genuine contribution” to security. It enshrined a number of cascading policies and decisions on force structure that have not been repudiated for the last 30 years. In fact, the most recent defense policy update, Our North Strong and Free, uses similar language.
To be sure, Canada has clear defense priorities: the defense of Canada, North America (in cooperation with the United States), and its other allies (particularly NATO), in that order. However, the country has also committed itself to maintaining a broad range of capabilities, and this is becoming unaffordable. Reaching NATO’s two percent spending guideline will be wholly insufficient given the backlog of deferred modernization programs and other issues. On the current trajectory, there are simply too few dollars chasing too many priorities. Furthermore, force structures and capability choices have prioritized capabilities that are increasingly incompatible with the broad swath of military developments today.
This has led Canada to a crossroads where it should either accept the continued decline of its military capabilities into a largely to a token force or consider radical alternatives to preserve its relevance on the battlefield and in international relations. The most viable option would be to implement specialization for parts of the Canadian Armed Forces, divesting some capabilities in order to reinforce those that are more relevant to the threat environment and the country’s interests. From this perspective, the army is a prime target for specialization, potentially refocusing it towards more niche roles.
The Scope of the Challenge
One of the most significant challenges facing the Canadian military’s current force structure is the dramatic diversification of the threat environment over the past 30 years. There is the emergence of new domains like cyber and space as well as development of new capabilities within existing domains such as hypersonic missiles, small unmanned vehicles, or directed energy weapons. Subsuming many of these capabilities is Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control — or the Canadian version of the concept, Pan-Domain Command and Control. In this context, responding to new threats does not simply mean developing individual, federated systems or platforms, but also integrating them collaboratively to massively enhance their speed and efficiency.
Second, the inflation of defense goods generally outpaces civilian sector goods by a few percentage points. While this has been a long-understood relationship, recent years have been particularly challenging due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the severe supply chain disruptions that occurred in its aftermath. At its most basic level, the Department of National Defence’s spending power has been eroded. Projects face implementation delays due to inefficient procurement practice, which further diminishes the purchasing power of budgets.
Finally, Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine have prompted a serious rethink concerning the capabilities and war stocks required for fighting a protracted near-peer conflict. Even during the Cold War, the Canadian Armed Forces were routinely criticized for maintaining insufficient stockpiles of munitions and reserve material. This issue was greatly exacerbated after 1990, when all pretense of maintaining a sufficient war stock was abandoned. For example, Canada acquired 82 Leopard 2A6s to sustain an operational deployment of 19 in the field. Considering training and maintenance considerations, there are fewer than five tanks available for attrition.
This issue has become particularly pronounced for Canada because of its expeditionary focus. With few direct threats to its sovereignty and its strong support for alliances, particularly NATO, a major part of defense planning revolves around deploying and sustaining a force abroad, as shown by the Leopard 2A6. The Department of National Defence has only now started reconsidering its force and material requirements to fight a potential near-peer conflict, including re-establishing offices tasked with such a responsibility. However, it is well behind the curve compared to Canada’s allies on this matter.
Taken together, these trends have increased the apparent cost of maintaining major capabilities, and adequate responses to threats. It does not help that Canada has deeply underfunded defense modernization over the past few decades. A recent Parliamentary Budget Office report found that 12 billion Canadian dollars of planned funding over the past seven years was never spent. This is in conjunction with broader underfunding of the department. From 2014 to 2023, Canada regularly only spent 1–1.5 percent of GDP on defense. What’s more, it only allocated 10–15 percent of this to equipment expenditure, as compared to the NATO guideline of 20 percent. Using NATO’s 2 percent commitment as a rough measure for what Canada should spend to maintain an effective military capability, the Canadian Armed Forces have been underfunded by approximately US$147 billion during this same period. This has been disproportionately applied to procurement accounts, which helps explain why the Canadian military operates 30-year-old frigates, 40-year-old tactical fighters, and nearly 45-year-old maritime patrol aircraft.
Furthermore, Canada’s personnel situation is at critical levels. While many NATO militaries face staffing issues, none are as acute as Canada’s. In many key positions, like pilots, sensor operators or marine technicians, manning is at 60 percent or lower of the total established strength. This means commands are wholly focused on maintaining existing capabilities, with little ability to adapt to new threats, circumstances, or opportunities.
Given these factors, it would not be a stretch to say that even if the Canadian government pushed beyond spending 2 percent of GDP, even reaching 3 percent, it is unlikely to be enough to adequately reverse these trends.
Response
The Department of National Defence has responded to its predicament a number of ways. The first is divesting some capabilities or delaying responding to new threats. These approaches were employed where the risk was manageable and a response could be easily (re)constituted by buying an existing off-the-shelf system if the threat became acute. For example, the Canadian Army divested its air-defense systems to focus on counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and is now attempting to resurrect the capability in light of the changing airpower threat environment.
For some capabilities, the cost of regeneration after its divesture is prohibitive and difficult to undertake, even if the immediate threat may not have been apparent. Thus the Canadian Armed Forces maintains a vestigial capability that can serve as an embryonic core for a future expansion if the need arises. Canada’s four Victoria-class submarines, for example, should nominally allow for one vessel to be available for operations at any one time. This represents a token capability for a state that has the world’s longest coastline and relies heavily on maritime trade for economic prosperity.
In many cases, however, neither divesture nor retaining a token capability are viable responses. A common approach has been to aggregate capabilities into fewer platforms. Faced with difficult budgetary choices, the Department of National Defence has chosen to consolidate a growing number of roles into the same number of platforms. The classic example is the CP-140 Aurora. While originally acquired as the air force’s maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare aircraft, over the decades it has been modified to include an overland intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. While the capability has been praised for its effectiveness, the increasing demand for the aircraft in the Indo-Pacific has put a strain on the airframe and its crews.
The pressure to aggregate capabilities has been exacerbated due to the chronic challenges that bedevil the defense procurement system. Considering the long delays in getting programs approved and implemented, the Department of National Defence often requires gold-plated platforms, insisting on improved performance to future-proof it. That approach has facilitated capability aggregation, since the perceived incremental cost of adding additional roles to a single platform is viewed as preferable to buying multiple platforms.
More often than not, capability growth is natural and beneficial — it allows a military to adapt organically to new circumstances quickly and effectively. However that differs to the situation described above, which are inelegant compromises forced onto the Canadian Armed Forces. In many cases, these capabilities cannot provide high levels of competency on any single mission as they are tasked to multiple missions — jacks of all trades, masters of none.
Aggregating capabilities typically comes at the expense of building up a warfighting reserve against a near-peer enemy. Fewer, gold-plated systems are also inherently less flexible in a high-attrition environment. They also complicate sustainment and replacement efforts, as highly specialized Canadian systems (often referred to as unicorns or orphans) are much more difficult to replace as the production capacity tends to be relatively small.
Furthermore, aggregated capabilities constrict personnel training pipelines, challenging staffing under peacetime conditions. Often certain positions face significantly higher operational tempo as they are overtasked to cover multiple mission types, while other personnel face the opposite problem of under-utilization due to lack of available time on a platform. Either circumstance aggravates the serious retention situation within the Canadian military and also severely curtails a capability’s ability to serve as an embryonic core to generate a much larger force in a future emergency.
All these factors have come together to create a highly inflexible force, particularly at the strategic and departmental level, with no spare resources or intellectual capacity to adapt to new threats. For militaries, flexibility and resources are valuable commodities to deal with the emerging threat environment, having become a core part of the reform efforts of many of Canada’s allies.
Facing the Future
While the Canadian military has muddled through the past 30 years, this is no longer an option. Today, the country’s combat capability has arguably declined to the point where it is only able to field token capabilities. These should be viewed as contributions that are too small and/or are of very limited military capability that their presence should considered largely symbolic in nature.
The Royal Canadian Navy can only effectively put two, possibly three, frigates at sea at any one time and the Royal Canadian Air Force is only able to keep a dozen fighters on alert for North American Aerospace Defense Command duties. The Canadian Army is struggling to sustain two battalions of troops as part of NATO’s Multinational Battle Group Latvia, even without modern air defense, artillery, and connectivity.
Furthermore, the development of integrated battlefield networks, combined with advances in data fusion and processing as well as unmanned vehicles, have started to change force structure concepts. Rather than aggregating capabilities into fewer, more costly platforms, they are becoming disaggregated in employment and acquisition. This is fundamentally incompatible with how the Department of National Defence approaches its force structure and procurement decisions. Already the Canadian military is woefully unprepared for a modern war involving pan-domain approaches, and many of its future force decisions continue the same doctrinal thinking that came before. As the challenges with the Latvia mission illustrate, it severely limits the military’s ability to assist allied efforts and may even be a vulnerability to them.
Canada has two potential avenues to address this new dilemma. The first is to continue to follow its current path: attempt to meet the full spectrum of challenges with an increase in defense spending and implementing significant reforms to the armed forces and the procurement system to modernize them. However, even with the current planned defense spending increases, this will likely result in the armed forces’ continued decline relative to the threat environment. Canada may maintain some areas of excellence but, overall, it is a bleak future where Canada will increasingly be able offer only token, rather than genuine, contributions to national and allied security. Much more dramatic funding increases, of course, could help facilitate more far-reaching and strategically effective modernization. But these are unrealistic in the current or foreseeable political environment, where neither major party seems interested in committing the necessary resources.
This leaves one realistic alternative: Canada should drop the pretense of having a full-spectrum military and consider specialization. This would require hard, painful choices and likely the divestment of certain roles. But it would facilitate retrenching towards specific threats as well as Canadian centers of excellence.
Any effort along these lines should complement Canada’s two alliance frameworks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command and NATO. Specialization, especially within a NATO context, is by no means a new concept — it has existed in various forms since the organization’s first strategic concept in 1949. The past two decades have seen the development of several novel forms, most recently in the framework state concept launched a decade ago. Canada’s contribution to the Enhanced Forward Presence in Latvia is one example and shows some of the potential for its future application.
Admittedly, there are risks to specialization. The most obvious is that given the dilapidated state of the Canadian Armed Forces, Ottawa would become even more reliant on allies to show up for almost any crisis the country may want to intervene in. While this is generally the reality today, specialization would further curtail Canada’s agency in managing complex foreign policy crises. Furthermore, there is a significant risk that a government may commit the armed forces to a crisis for which they are ill-suited, creating greater risk to personnel or endangering overall mission success.
Further complicating matters is the capability dilemma described above. Technological and doctrinal shifts are already fundamentally reshaping the nature of interoperability and specialization. The core of any multi- or pan-domain effort is interconnectivity: the harmonization of data standards, protocols, and procedures. Considering its profound consequences on force structures and doctrine, interconnectivity’s influence will be equally important in the future of interoperability. While several bilateral and multilateral efforts are ongoing in this area, like AUKUS pillar 2, they are fragmented, uneven, and plagued by a variety of issues that constrain data sharing, customization, and application of analytical tools.
These choices relate to the broader question of how Canada should develop its pan-domain capability. It could attempt to develop these systems domestically to specific Canadian specifications, or it could adopt allied standards and technologies even if they may not be compatible with Canadian doctrine or defense policy. Customizations and upgrades can be costly and negatively impact interoperability. The Canadian military leadership, to its credit, has viewed North American Aerospace Defense Command modernization as an opportunity to leverage Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control developments in kickstarting the Royal Canadian Air Force’s own pan-domain efforts. However, as a recent study by Alex Rudolph concludes, the Canadian military as a whole has failed to move forward effectively on this area and remains well behind the development of its allies.
This leads to the difficult question: What areas should Canada specialize in? Given Ottawa’s need to defend North American aerospace in cooperation with the United States, and the current focus on modernization, the air force should be a priority. Historically, airpower has also been heavily employed as a foreign policy instrument. Moreover, the Canadian aerospace industry is highly capable and agile, making it well placed to assist the military in these areas. Similarly, the navy will also likely play a strong role in the future. Considering Canada’s large coastlines and heavy reliance on maritime trade for prosperity, a robust naval capability, centered around 16 River-class destroyers and potentially 12 conventional submarines, will ensure the service remains relevant. This would likely leave the Canadian Army to bear the brunt of potential cuts, continuing the trend of the past decade.
One option, recently raised by Andrew Erskine, would be to move the army toward a “light force” concept. This involves focusing less on heavy conventional fights and more on stand-in forces that are light, mobile, and stealthy with significant firepower. This could involve the divestment of heavy conventional capabilities, like tanks and heavy artillery, in favor of lightweight mobile forces that could operate seamlessly with allied contributions.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to Canada’s dilemma, regardless of whether it decides to retain a broad spectrum of capabilities or undergo specialization. Additional funding and accelerating the transformation of the armed forces is essential. Furthermore, managing new technological advances will require a dramatic shift in how procurement operates. The government desperately needs to adopt policies that enable greater agility within acquisition and sustainment, while ensuring that outputs can be delivered at the scale required for any potential conflict. Successfully adapting to this new environment may also provide flexibility to adapt systems against new threats in ways that were not possible a few decades ago.
The risks of the status quo are clear. Canada’s military is already in a dire state after decades of neglect and underfunding. Unless serious corrective action is taken, including increasing funding, altering the mission and force structure, and addressing procurement issues, Canada will slide further into irrelevance.
Richard Shimooka is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, focusing on defense policy and procurement in Canada and the United States. Prior to that he was a senior fellow at the Defence Management Studies Program at Queen’s University.
