Canada’s Defense Delusion: A Nation Unready, Unarmed, and Undisciplined

Imagine, for a moment, a fire brigade that cannot recruit firemen, whose trucks won’t start, whose stations are crumbling, and whose hoses have been on backorder for a decade. Now, imagine that brigade declaring to the neighborhood that it will henceforth be acting alone, severing ties with the better-equipped department next door. Such is the extraordinary posture of Prime Minister Mark Carney, who recently pronounced that Canada and the United States have reached the end of their defensive entente. The implication is unmistakable: Canada will go it alone.

But go where, and with what?

To say that Canada is militarily helpless is not to indulge in hyperbole, but to confront a reality long obscured by diplomatic euphemism. The Canadian Armed Forces are not merely under-resourced; they are structurally incapacitated. The nation lacks the manpower, equipment, logistical depth, and political seriousness to defend its own vast territory, much less contribute meaningfully to the defense of NATO allies or embattled democracies like Ukraine. The Canadian military is, to borrow Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short—in staffing, in supplies, and in strategic thinking.

Begin with manpower. The Canadian Armed Forces are authorized to field around 101,500 personnel. As of 2025, they are short by at least 16,000. This is not a minor discrepancy; it is a hemorrhage. Nearly 15% of the force exists only on paper. And even among those still wearing the uniform, a distressing number are functionally undeployable: overweight, undertrained, or shackled by bureaucratic delays that make a military posting resemble a Kafkaesque waiting room.

In some vital specialties—aviation technicians, naval crews, combat medics—the effective manning levels have dropped to less than half of what operational requirements demand. Training pipelines are slowed to a crawl. The few who do enlist find themselves waiting upwards of a year and a half for security clearances and medical screenings. And when they finally report for duty, the story turns tragicomic: in one recent deployment to Europe, Canadian troops reportedly had to borrow basic equipment—including helmets—from their American counterparts. Others bought their own kit from civilian retailers.

This is not merely inconvenient. It is existential. A military without the ability to equip and train its soldiers is not a military but a costume party at the edge of a battlefield.

Meanwhile, Canada’s equipment is aging into irrelevance. The CF-18 fighter jets that constitute the bulk of the Royal Canadian Air Force entered service when Ronald Reagan was still in office. They are scheduled to be replaced—eventually—by F-35s, but the procurement timeline reads more like speculative fiction than strategic planning. The first planes arrive in 2026, with operational capability projected deep into the next decade. In the meantime, readiness rates for the CF-18 fleet hover at less than 45%.

At sea, matters are no better. Canada’s Navy sails a handful of Halifax-class frigates built in the 1990s, each now reaching the twilight of its service life. No destroyers. No replenishment ships until at least the 2030s. The submarine fleet? All four boats are hand-me-downs from the United Kingdom, built in the late 1980s. At any given time, only one is likely to be operable.

Canada’s army, too, functions more as a museum than a warfighting institution. Tanks and armored vehicles from the Cold War remain in use. Anti-aircraft capabilities are nonexistent—Canada scrapped them a decade ago and is only now beginning to consider replacements. Even sidearms have taken years to replace. The logistical inertia is not merely embarrassing; it is disqualifying. Other NATO allies, facing the same post-Cold War environment, have adapted. Canada has not.

And then there is the matter of infrastructure. Bases are falling apart. More than a quarter of military buildings are over 50 years old. Roofs leak. Heating systems fail. Some barracks are plagued by mold. Up north, where any claim to Arctic sovereignty will be tested by Chinese or Russian interest, radar installations remain relics of the Cold War, incapable of detecting modern cruise missiles or stealth incursions. There are few ports, few airstrips, and fewer still with the logistical support necessary for sustained Arctic operations.

The state of readiness is such that in the event of a real conflict—a major flare-up in the Baltics, a Chinese move against Taiwan, or even a homeland emergency in the far north—Canada would struggle to deploy more than a battalion-sized force with working kit. Even in support of Ukraine, Canadian contributions have been valuable symbolically but marginal materially. Training missions. Small arms. Occasional artillery. These are gestures, not commitments.

Indeed, in comparative terms, Canada is now among the weakest militaries in NATO. Its defense spending remains below 1.5% of GDP, despite repeated pledges to reach the 2% threshold. Poland, by contrast, now spends over 3.5% and fields one of the most rapidly modernizing militaries in Europe. Even Belgium—yes, Belgium—has outlined a plan to meet the NATO standard within a decade. Canada has not.

The dysfunction is not new, but it has metastasized. Equipment procurement takes decades. Projects are snarled in layers of bureaucracy, with multiple departments and agencies fighting over turf, and with final decisions made not by military necessity but by political expediency and regional pork-barrel calculations. Ships are built in Canadian shipyards not because they are faster or cheaper but because they are Canadian. Meanwhile, budgets are allocated but not spent. Projects are announced but not advanced. And capabilities continue to degrade.

To make matters worse, the leadership culture of the military has spent the last several years embroiled in scandal and self-flagellation. Sexual misconduct allegations against senior officers have led to resignations and reviews, but also to an institutional inwardness—a turn away from warfighting as the military’s primary vocation and toward an identity politics-inflected model of cultural transformation. While no serious person denies the need for justice and professionalism, the prioritization of "equity" over readiness has consequences. Soldiers may soon find themselves fully compliant with DEI standards, but without rifles that work or aircraft that fly.

What, then, are we to make of Prime Minister Carney's suggestion that Canada will forge a new, independent path in defense policy—that it will no longer rely on the United States for military partnership? It is fantasy. Worse, it is a dangerous fantasy. The Canadian military is not capable of defending the second-largest country in the world. It is barely capable of defending Ottawa. To imagine that such a force could substitute for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), or function independently in a global conflict, is to traffic in strategic delusion.

Of course, sovereignty is an admirable aspiration. But sovereignty must be underwritten by power. Sovereignty without capability is a slogan. If Canada wishes to sever its military dependence on the United States, then it must first construct an actual military. That means urgent investment. That means procurement reform. That means ending the culture of bureaucratic delay and political buck-passing. It means training troops, fixing bases, buying ships, and accepting the hard truth that defense is not a luxury.

The neighborhood is on fire. Canada cannot afford to pretend it has a brigade, let alone act as if it doesn’t need the one next door. In this world, security is indivisible. And as it stands, Canada is not a partner in defense. It is a dependent. A noble one, perhaps. But a dependent nonetheless.

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