For most Canadian technology firms, the Canadian Armed Forces are practically out of reach. It would be one thing to say the CAF has been a difficult customer. The fact is it hasn’t been a customer at all.
Defence procurement here runs through a small number of established suppliers on long programs. Everyone else — and that’s the overwhelming majority of firms building sensing, autonomy, communications, energy and materials — has never had the military in their addressable market. Not rejected by it. Never in it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds, because of what it means never happened.
Think about how a market normally teaches its participants anything. A company builds something. Some customers buy it and most don’t. The company learns why and adjusts. Repeat that a thousand times and you get products serving needs nobody could have specified in advance — which is precisely the kind of need that matters most, because it’s the kind nobody knew how to write down.
Commercial technology has to pass through that loop to get good. It’s also exactly the loop spin-in depends on: the state adopting things that were shaped by a market it wasn’t part of.
Between Canadian industry and the Canadian military, that loop has never turned.
It’s worth sitting with what that means, because “slow” and “never started” are different problems. Think of an engine you have to hand-crank. A cold engine that turns over reluctantly is an annoyance — you know the thing runs, you just need more effort or a better morning. An engine that has never fired is something else. The first revolution is the expensive one. You are not overcoming friction; you are overcoming the fact that nothing in the system has any memory of having moved. And the person cranking has no way of knowing whether they are close.
That’s where we are. Every founder who takes a meeting is turning the handle a few degrees. The frustrating part — and the reason so many stop — is that the engine gives you almost nothing back until it catches.
So the requirements aren’t just unmet. They go undiscovered. Nobody on the military side is failing to buy a thing they know they want. They’re not encountering the thing at all, which means they never form the preference, which means the signal never travels back, which means nothing gets built toward it.
The uncomfortable implication is worth stating plainly. There are almost certainly companies in this country right now holding most of what the Armed Forces need, and neither party has any way of finding out.
What this means if you’re building something
The discovery burden falls on you. That’s not fair and it’s not how it should work, but it’s where things stand, and knowing it changes what you do.
Stop waiting to be found. There is no scouting function scanning the Canadian commercial base for relevant capability. The mechanism you’re imagining does not exist at the scale you’re imagining it.
Get in front of operators, not just buyers. The person who can tell you whether your thing is useful and the person who can purchase it are almost never the same person, and the useful conversation is the first one. It won’t produce a sale. It will tell you whether to keep going, which is worth more at this stage.
Write down what you learn and share it. Every founder who has this conversation is generating market intelligence that currently dies in a single company’s notebook. The loop hasn’t turned partly because nobody’s aggregating the turns.
Treat early conversations as research, not pipeline. If you forecast them as pipeline you’ll be wrong, you’ll be wrong publicly, and you’ll stop.
There’s one more reason the loop can’t correct itself, and it’s the deepest of the three. The two sides don’t share a unit of measurement.
Next: no shared unit of measurement.
This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]
