Canada has committed $2.67 billion to build a network of Arctic infrastructure hubs designed to serve the Canadian Armed Forces and Northern communities. The Northern Operational Support Hubs (NOSH) program, part of Canada’s first Defence Industrial Strategy, pairs airports, seaports, health care, and power generation under one investment, calling the result climate-resilient and dual-use by design.
The program does not yet specify how these hubs will be tested against the disruptions they are meant to survive. Canada is walking into a blind spot the U.S. defense community took nearly a decade to close: a base can pass a rigorous self-sufficiency test and still fail if the regional power, fuel logistics, or transportation network it depends on collapses at the same time. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) learned this by testing installations in isolation first, then rebuilding its approach around the region each installation actually depends on. Canada has the chance to skip that decade of learning.
Designing Resilience from Day One
The Department of National Defence should build a regional resilience planning process into the NOSH build-out now, before hubs are finalized, not after one fails. That process needs three elements the U.S. added only after years of trial: a utility interdependency analysis that maps where hub infrastructure and community systems share risk; sustained collaboration with Northern and Indigenous communities, which the Defence Industrial Strategy already commits to; and military-civilian exercises that bring installation planners, territorial utility operators, and local emergency managers into the same room to test shared vulnerabilities together. Testing those vulnerabilities before the acquisition is finalized is itself a procurement reform: it moves resilience from a post-award fix to a pre-award requirement.
That planning process should extend to how the hub generates its own power. The power generation piece is a net-zero investment: solar, wind, storage, and microgrids replacing diesel generators. That is an operational readiness requirement before it is a climate one. Less diesel means less fuel moving through a resupply line that, in the Arctic, runs on a short sealift or ice-road season and fails the moment that season is disrupted. A hub that generates and stores its own power depends less on that line, and that dependence is the vulnerability NOSH is meant to close. Building that generation and storage into the hub’s mission requirements, and testing it against the same regional stress as the rest of the hub, is what turns it into a resilience investment rather than a carbon target.
The Base in Isolation, the Region at Risk
Black start exercises, formally the Energy Resilience Readiness Exercise (ERRE) program, exist because the U.S. DoD set out to answer a narrower question of resilience: if the commercial grid goes down, can an installation restart its own power without outside help? The exercises test an installation’s ability to self-generate, sequence critical loads, and keep missions running with no outside grid. It is a rigorous test, and installations that pass deserve real credit.
Running that test repeatedly across different installations and scenarios exposed that a base is not an island, and treating it as one undermines the resilience the program intended to build. The same storm, cyberattack, or fuel disruption that takes down a base’s primary feed can just as easily take out the substation five miles away or the water treatment plant it depends on. An installation shares its transmission lines, diesel supply, and water systems with the community around it, so a test confined to the fence line never faces the condition most likely to trigger it: a regional outage.
Turning That Gap into a Shared Response
That recognition led to the creation of the U.S. Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation’s Installation Readiness Program, launched in 2021. It gives installations and their surrounding communities a funded, structured process for identifying and fixing the shared vulnerabilities that neither side can address alone.
A regional interdependency analysis informs a tabletop exercise that pairs people who would not normally work together — an installation energy manager, a regional utility planner, a county emergency coordinator — to test the installation and its community as one system. Lifeline utility operators who may not regularly consider cascading failures across interdependent systems (i.e., water, wastewater, gas, electricity) address these linkages collectively as part of the same exercise. The exercises escalate from a manageable scenario, often a flood or severe storm, to a deliberate, coordinated attack, and close with a workshop on what it would take to fix the vulnerabilities identified, who funds it, and how. The coordination remains voluntary, dependent on buy-in from both sides.
U.S. Congress is now turning what black start exercises revealed into a legal requirement: energy resilience does not stop at the installation’s fence line.
Federal defense policy directs military departments to work with state and local governments on infrastructure resilience beyond the fence line, and a separate statute sets energy availability targets as high as 99.9999% for critical missions, a standard no installation can meet through on-base generation alone. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act extends that logic off base, requiring military departments to enter into area-wide public utility provider partnerships and to engage directly with civilian grid regulators and transmission planners for the first time.
Canada’s Head Start
Canada does not have to wait years to implement U.S. lessons. It can build the same principle into NOSH now by engaging the utilities, Northern communities, and emergency managers who will depend on these hubs as partners in the design process, not stakeholders briefed after the fact.
This is where dual-use energy investments earn their name: serving defense readiness and climate and industrial policy at once. Within NOSH, the same generation and storage assets that keep a hub’s mission running through a crisis are the ones that count toward Canada’s emissions targets and its push for a domestic manufacturing base. It is what mission assurance actually requires when the fence line is drawn where the vulnerability truly resides, not where the property line happens to sit.
Alex Pina works at the intersection of energy resilience, critical infrastructure, and national security. He developed the Energy Resilience Readiness Exercise (ERRE) program, which uses real-world power outages to identify vulnerabilities in installation energy infrastructure. As a Principal at Converge Strategies, he leads the team executing Installation Readiness Reviews in partnership with the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation. Alex holds a Master of Science in Engineering and Management and a Bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering from MIT.
Leah Emanuel bridges the electricity industry and the national security enterprise, developing concepts that align transmission investment with national defense. She applies her engagement experience to identify stakeholders, understand their individual vulnerabilities, and build specialized energy resilience strategies. She has authored several pieces on energy security risks and the changing geopolitical landscape. Leah is a Senior Associate at Converge Strategies and holds a Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.
The views expressed in this op-ed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute or its staff.
