For most of the last century, defence technology moved in one direction. The state wanted something for military reasons, paid for the hard part, and the civilian economy inherited the result. There’s a word for it: spin-off.
The examples are so familiar they’ve stopped registering as examples. ARPANET was built by an American defence research agency to keep computers talking through disruption; it became the foundations of the internet. GPS began as a U.S. Air Force navigation constellation and turned into the thing that finds you a restaurant. Radar came out of air defence and now sits in every airliner and most cars. Jet propulsion, nuclear power, microwave ovens, the integrated circuit — all of it started as something a government wanted for military reasons.
Canada has its own version of this lineage, and it’s better than most Canadians know.
In 1949 the Royal Canadian Navy and Ferranti Canada built DATAR — a digital system that fused radar and sonar from several ships into a single shared picture of a battle. It worked on Lake Ontario in 1953, a decade before anyone else managed the same trick.
Then nothing. Canada couldn’t afford to fit the fleet, and the Americans built their own. The computing didn’t disappear — it went on to power one of the world’s first computerised airline reservation systems, for Trans-Canada Air Lines, and became the model for a mainframe sold to Britain that seeded a major British computer line. Twenty years later Spar Aerospace built the Canadarm, and that robotics expertise flowed outward into MDA, into surgical robotics, into industrial automation.
That’s the pattern, and it’s worth naming precisely: the state pays for the hard part, and the civilian economy inherits the benefit. Under that model, a country’s technological standing was a function of what its government was willing to fund.
It’s a good model. It built the modern world. And almost everything about how Canada buys defence technology still assumes it’s the model we’re in.
What this means if you’re building something
Notice what the spin-off world implied about a company like yours. It implied you were downstream. The requirement came from the state, the science was funded by the state, the result was owned by the state, and you got access when it was released. Your job was to commercialise something that already existed.
Nothing about how you actually operate looks like that. You raised money from investors who need a return on a commercial timeline. You built something because a market signalled it wanted it. Nobody specified your product to you.
That gap — between the position the system expects you to occupy and the position you’re actually in — is the source of most of the friction founders describe when they try to sell into defence. It isn’t hostility. It’s a set of institutions that were designed on the assumption that the interesting technology starts on their side of the table.
It doesn’t anymore. That’s the next post.
Next: the direction reversed.
This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]
