Somewhere over the approaches to North America this week, a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) CF-18 will fly an intercept alongside a United States Air Force F-15 Eagle. The two crews will share one radio net, one encrypted data link, one air picture, and one binational chain of command that has run without interruption since 1958. Neither pilot will give a second thought to interoperability.
That said, the politics beneath that partnership have shifted. Canada and the United States no longer agree on trade, on foreign policy, or even on what the map should say.
Ottawa has turned to Europe, with a new security and defence partnership announced, along with an invitation into Europe’s rearmament. But beneath that courtship sits a deeper problem. Canada’s military cannot operate with Finland’s at anything close to the depth it operates with America’s, and it fares only marginally better with Britain’s.
Canada has never been more interoperable with an ally it trusts less, nor more aligned with allies it cannot fight beside as one force.
For a country of 40 million, with the world’s longest coastline and a trade-based economy, fighting as part of someone else’s force has long been the premise of Canadian defence. Interoperability enables a small military to be consequential inside a larger coalition, and it is how a trading nation earns a say in the order that keeps its trading lanes open.
But Canada built that interoperability almost entirely through Washington. Canada buys American equipment and trains to American doctrine, and its forces are built to slot into American formations. Even Canada’s connections to Europe run on American rails: Ottawa can agree with Helsinki about nearly everything, and their forces can pass targeting data, but only across American networks and under American cryptography keys, inside a command structure that Washington leads.
That arrangement rested on one assumption: that Canada and the United States share a view of the world and of each other’s place in it. The assumption was never perfect. Canada stayed out of Vietnam and Iraq and sits out the war with Iran today, yet the arrangement held, largely because those disagreements were about wars somewhere else. This time, the disagreement is about North America itself, about American designs on Greenland and whether Canada’s sovereignty is a settled or open question.
As Prime Minister Carney put it at Davos, integration becomes subordination when the mutual benefit goes out of it. Nothing about the Canadian Armed Forces’ technical integration with the United States military has changed. But the American-held cryptographic keys, the ITAR-controlled components, and the sustainment chains that make it work now look like leverage as much as shared capability, as the debate over the F-35’s so-called kill switch has made plain.
The obvious response, replacing American technical integration with European, cannot be achieved on any relevant timeline. Political alignment shifts at the pace of elections, and a future U.S. administration may try to repair what this one has broken. But integration as Canada has always built it, through common platforms and joint sustainment, moves at the pace of procurement: in decades. Canada cannot count on swapping American defence technology for European before the political problem in Washington resolves itself, one way or the other. For Canada, the more timely question is which investments will pay off in both futures.
The answer is to build what Canada itself controls, and to build it for both futures at once. Technical interoperability is becoming less a property of exquisite hardware and more one of software: the data architectures and mission systems that determine whether platforms can talk decide more than the platforms do.
A bridge to Europe made of new frigates and fighter fleets would take 30 years. One made of code and cheap, attritable mass could be built in a few years, because software moves as fast as the companies writing it. And a bridge built open carries in any direction, toward an American future, a European one, or a blend more likely than either.
Even better, Canada holds a position no other ally does. The Defence Production Sharing Agreement and its ITAR exemption already put Canadian industry inside the American defence industrial base, and the new EU partnership now opens Europe’s to it as well.
Building the bridge starts with what Ottawa buys. Its procurement rules should require open, sovereign data architectures for the systems that connect Canadian forces, so that anything integrated in Canada can work with American formations, with European ones, or with both, rather than locking to one foreign supplier or flag.
Canada also has to choose who it builds with. Too many American platforms are closed and likely to stay that way, but the coalition of the future will fight through a scalable, open software mesh of command systems, data fusion, shared autonomy, and integrated sensing. That mesh should be built with the Nordics, Britain, and Australia, the partners who share Canada’s dilemma, inside Europe’s rearmament programs and alongside the American ones Canadian firms already serve.
Finally, Canada has to train with those partners, because connected systems are worth little to units that have never worked together. Canada gets that practice daily inside NORAD. It now needs the same muscle memory with Europeans, built through an increased tempo of exercises in Latvia and the Arctic where allied units learn one another’s procedures and data moves between national systems as a matter of routine. None of it needs new ships or aircraft, and one government’s mandate is enough time for all of it. Capability, more than any communiqué, is what would give European capitals a reason to build with Canada rather than simply align with it.
The window for building that bridge will not stay open. The next generation of military systems is being designed now, and the autonomous collaborative platforms that will fly beside crewed fighters within a decade will be interoperable with whomever their software lets them join. If Canada writes that software itself, on open standards, and sells it to Washington and to Europe alike, seamlessness stops being something an ally can grant or withhold.
A Canadian pilot should one day fly an intercept beside a Finnish F-35 or a British Typhoon, with an uncrewed Canadian wingman on the net, the way today’s RCAF crews fly beside an American F-15, without a second thought. After 70 years of receiving its interoperability from Washington, Canada now has to build its own and share it.
William Richardson holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University, is a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, and works at Dominion Dynamics as Director, Defence Markets.
The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute or its staff.
