Five groups have to make this work, and each of them is doing something entirely sensible from where it sits. Each is also, from where the other four sit, the problem.
The end user — the Canadian Armed Forces. They define the requirement and carry the consequence when it fails. Military culture is properly intolerant of failure, and careers end over visible mistakes far more often than over opportunities quietly missed. So it’s rational to demand the complete, fully proven system and wait for it. But requirements now change faster than the buying cycle, and members operate aging equipment while imperfect-but-better options sit on the market today.
The buyer — the public service. They hold the money, write the rules, run the competitions, issue the clearances. Visible waste is punished hard; opportunities never taken carry no penalty at all. So slow, defensible and fully documented wins every time. Meanwhile a dollar never spent never compounds.
The money — investors. They decide which companies exist long enough to matter. Canadian early-stage capital is measured against software returns and American comparisons. A defence company has long sales cycles, one government buyer and regulatory complexity, so it prices as unfinanceable. It’s rational to wait for a safer round, or send the capital south. But you can’t pick a winner out of a population that’s been starved.
The innovators — founders, accelerators, the ecosystem. This layer is supposed to translate between the soldier and the market. It’s measured on visible activity: events held, cohorts run, logos on a slide. Its fluency is almost entirely commercial, and very few people in it have served. So it optimises for markets where it already speaks the language.
The primes — established industry. They bring what nobody else can: scale, and the ability to keep something in service for thirty years. Long programs and offset obligations reward a moat around the customer, so it’s rational to protect margin and treat a startup as either a threat or cheap subcontract capacity. But the moat starves the ecosystem underneath it.
Five groups. Five entirely defensible positions. One collective failure.
I didn’t work this out on paper. I worked it out sitting in three of those five chairs and spending a lot of time around the other two. Nine years in the army taught me why a soldier wants a hundred-percent-effective solution he can depend on. Time inside a federal department taught me why a public servant documents the decision rather than makes it. Doing investment diligence taught me why a defence company looks unfinanceable on a spreadsheet.
What surprised me was the symmetry. In every room, people were competent and behaving sensibly given what they were measured on — and in every room, the other four groups were named as the obstacle.
Nobody here is being irrational. That’s the finding, and it’s worse than the alternative. A system failing because of bad actors can be fixed by removing them. A system failing because everyone is behaving sensibly can only be fixed by changing what sensible means.
What this means if you’re building something
Work out which chair you’re actually pitching to, and what that chair is rewarded for. You are not persuading an organisation. You are persuading a person whose incentives you can name — and if what you’re asking them to do would look bad if it went wrong, you need to make it survivable for them, not just attractive.
Next: the sixth party.
This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]
