Vanguard Magazine

Le to right: Victor Khoo, Director, C5ISRT, GDMS-Canada, BGen Stéphane Masson, Chief of Staff Army Strategy, MGen Colin Keiver (Ret'd) Associate, CFN Consultants 26FEBRUARY/MARCH 2026 www.vanguardcanada.com Reducing time through rapid evolution be- comes a strategic advantage as delay increas- es risk just as speed reduces it. Blue-Red team structure in engineering/design, with adversarial engineering is ideal. Complex or major projects need many small bets suc- cessfully to advance. Where possible, pro- grams should be portfolios to scale winners fast and eliminate failures early – fail fast. The CAF is burdened with legacy systems and equipment and needs to substitute sus- tainment with replacement – treat systems as consumable. To build Canadian economic capacity we need new metrics for procurement based on factors such as deployment time, unit of ca- pability by unit of cost, modular and open architecture with components designed to be lost, scaled or replaced. DND needs to reassess the value of investment and capital – a $10 million contract can lead to a $100 million investment in small to medium- sized businesses (SMBs). The Department needs a national integrator as a strategic partner and reduce or eliminate areas where government competes with industry. DevOps in practice: From prototype to battlefield The first panel of the day was moderated by Col Derek Lay, Comd JWC and examined different approaches to DevOps ambition and capability development. Panelists were the Army's Col Jay Estrela DDACSI & D Sigs, LCol Nicolas Verrault, Head Joint UxS Office and LCol Amanda Whelan, Di- rector RCAF Digital Hub. Common themes were the use of data to drive decision-making based on data- portfolio integration, not silos. The agreed premise that we must fight from prototype with rapid iterative development and work with operators at every step. CloudTAK, the Army's futures network, will guide net- work development, data team developers and the challenge of scaling innovation in the Army across the Brigades. This initiative seeks tactical compute, to the edge, off-line, with bandwidth/capacity trade-offs against size/weight/power. Develop TTP's while delivering/deploying a solution. All panel- ists agreed on innovating and updating the devices going into the tactical environment, beginning with a minimum viable product, iterating based on local conditions. The dif- ficulty for configuration management will be enormous but Modular Open System for Design (MOSD) will mitigate. We must balance the need to function within an en- terprise architecture with the need to inno- vate at the tactical edge. Lessons from Latvia and the MINERVA Initiative Panel one was followed by a discussion on the evolving battlefield Army's focusing on Latvia's experiences, and the MINERVA Initiative. MGen (ret'd) Colin Keiver, BGen Stéphane Masson, COS Strat and Victor Khoo, Director C5ISRT, GDMS all partici- pated. One of the four priorities in the Cana- dian Army (CA) modernization plan is the deployment of a C4ISR capability at all functional levels – section to division. Cur- rent ambition exceeds capacity mainly due to process. All three speakers agreed that speed is more important than completeness and that agility in procurement is more a culture failure than a process. The CA must engage early with industry as most solutions already exist – test, validate, trust. Challenge the requirement and the solution to get a best available product but remain adaptable. Most challenges are not technical, they are people, process, and culture issues. Col- lectively we are ready to pull together; we don't know how. The Comd CA owns the risk, but the lia- bility is shared across multiple organizations – ADM Mat and PSPC. We need better ways to express failure – knowing you will fail is different than advancing with purpose and failing. Too often we are paralyzed by endless studying, assessing, testing, trialing but never delivering a capability! We need small wins that build momentum and the ability to reinforce success. The final discussion of the day focused on the Digital Services Group (DSG) and its mandate to drive digital transformation across the enterprise. MGen Cayle Ober- warth, COS DSG and Sam Witherspoon, CEO of Anvil Intelligence, spoke about the need to position ourselves for success – in military terms, to win. The CAF needs to deter, and as necessary, decisively defeat an opponent in overwhelming victory to limit cost. However, our enterprise C2 has inher- ent vulnerabilities, is hard to reproduce and is definitely not disposable. We need strate- gic partners to create more durable systems of systems. The Government of Canada (GoC) is positioned to provide DND/ CAF with twice the resources; however, they will expect twice the output/effects. The institution needs to be more decisive at quickly selecting winners and let the other industry partners get up, dust off and move on. Of the resource triangle—people, time, and money—the CAF now has money. It has no time to spare and limited person- nel. There is universal agreement that we cannot use traditional procurement pro- cesses to acquire digital functions as two- year distant technology cannot be quanti- fied. COS DSG confirmed that Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) capability development will be owned by CFJC, with the ultimate con- sumer being Comd CJOC. How the CAF trade structure may need to be adapted was an open-ended question with a broad range of opinions. The conference struck the right balance of examining how institutional authorities can enable agile tactical responses when all par- ties seek a common effect – rapid DevOps. With all parties in violent agreement about the need to move decisively and rapidly, the next logical bound is to identify the "how", which will undoubtedly be the most diffi- cult discussion. Col Alexander (Sandy) Schwab (Ret'd) is a partner at CFN Consultants offering significant expertise and understanding into current C4ISR integration challenges. He served in the Canadian Armed Forces as an Army Signal Officer for over 38 years.

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