Vanguard Magazine

R A P I D LY E V O LV I N G T E C H www.vanguardcanada.com APRIL/MAY 2025 29 clients in Navy command - they are to maximize platform availability. We've got a small number of highly sophisticated as- sets. The end user needs them available to be able to take them out to sea to man- age our maritime security – we must mini- mize the whole force workforce demand and to update and upgrade technology at the speed of relevance. The challenge for us is whether we can learn forward to a wartime risk calculus at the speed at which we would expect our adversary to actually have adapted and be updating and upgrad- ing their capabilities. RICHARD GRAVEL: Q: What about the people component? When you're adding new capabilities, oen while ships are still in operation, there's a significant human element to consider. You need to train operators and maintainers, update operational doctrine, and ensure leadership is aligned as well as considering industry input vis-à-vis capability installation. Could you speak more broadly about the people and talent considerations involved in enabling more rapid capability insertion? RAdm STEVE McCARTHY: When it comes to the innovation journey, I find that we do tend to rush to a solution that we can sell. In doing so, we miss the true genius of engineers, which is taking an idea or invention and innovating it into a useful product that we can field at scale, and which is lethal to the enemy. We're not innovating as well as we could be in that space. So, the first bit of the people component, I would say is the skills of the technologists that we can bring to rapidly accelerate those capabilities into service. The bigger the ship, the easier it is to do concurrent engineering because there's a lot of real estate and you tend to annoy people less. I think the biggest advantage that we've seen is that we are not rushing immature design guidance to get it fitted when the ship is in dry dock and then re- gret that we didn't finish the design well enough when it comes to trying to set a work trial and accept it. There is another people component to doing this sort of work during the operating cycle. And if we're spending a long time grinding, weld- ing, operating what is a home for a couple of hundred sailors, we also need to make sure that we thought about the hygiene factors of minimizing their exposure to the production effort that accompanies the en- gineering. "When it comes to the innovation journey, I find that we do tend to rush to a solution that we can sell and in doing so we miss the true genius of engineers, which is taking an idea or invention and innovating it into a useful product that we can field at scale, and which is lethal to the enemy." — RAdm Steve McCarthy REGISTER NOW London, Ontario, Canada OCTOBER 21 & 22, 2025 bestdefenceconference.com

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