Canada Is Building the Wrong Army for the War That Is Coming

[rangerrebew]

Canada Is Building the Wrong Army for the War That Is Coming
By Andrew Latham
December 23, 2025
 
The next major land war will not reward elegance, boutique modernization, or the comforting belief that advanced technology can replace mass and endurance. It will expose armies built on fragile assumptions. Concealment has largely disappeared. Attrition has returned as a central fact of combat. Sustainment shapes outcomes as decisively as firepower. Yet the Canadian Army remains organized, equipped, and intellectually anchored to a vision of warfare that belonged to yesterday’s world. The problem is not a simple modernization lag or a lack of new kit. It is a deeper conceptual failure—a refusal to absorb how radically and irreversibly the character of land warfare has changed.

That is the larger point. The key change is not this or that technology. The battlespace itself has changed. Artificial intelligence, proliferated drones, commercial satellites, autonomous strike systems, and persistent ISR have combined into a transparent, data-rich battlespace where everyone is on the move, movement is tracked instantly, concentrations are targeted rapidly, and supply lines are targeted as soon as they begin to form—an environment already documented in assessments of modern conflict. An army that cannot scatter, regenerate while under fire, and sustain itself while under persistent observation is not going to muddle through. It is going to break.


Transparency and the End of Concealment
Western armies have operated on the assumptions of concealment and intermittent detection for a generation. Those assumptions are no longer valid. The contemporary battlespace is full of aerial surveillance, open-source commercial satellite imagery, digital emissions that reveal every vehicle and headquarters location, and loitering munitions that make ground above those locations perpetually contested—patterns captured in recent operational analyses.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/12/23/canada_is_building_the_wrong_army_for_the_war_that_is_coming_1154921.html

[rangerrebew]

It figures.  Now the US has to plan to defend its northern border without Canada no matter what ever else is happening in the world.

[Cyber Liberty]

Canada is not preparing for an external threat because it prefers to fight internal threats like farmers.

[Smokin Joe]

Canada is not preparing for an external threat because it prefers to fight internal threats like farmers.

Ottawa has been at war with the freer thinking Canadians for quite some time. If there's a stupid idea, there, you don't have to guess which direction it came from, just whether it is in French or English.

[Fishrrman]

Canada has an "army" ???

Who knew...???

[libertybele]

It figures.  Now the US has to plan to defend its northern border without Canada no matter what ever else is happening in the world.

The  U.S. should be defending its northern border w/o Canada -- the U.S. Canadian border poses a real threat to our country -- deportations and stopping the invasion at our northern border is crucial because Canada sure as heck isn't going to help.  Canada has gone from a relatively conservative close ally to a liberal wonkie slanted country.

[Cyber Liberty]

The  U.S. should be defending its northern border w/o Canada -- the U.S. Canadian border poses a real threat to our country -- deportations and stopping the invasion at our northern border is crucial because Canada sure as heck isn't going to help.  Canada has gone from a relatively conservative close ally to a liberal wonkie slanted country.

The US needs to treat the Canadian border like the Mexican border.

[libertybele]

The US needs to treat the Canadian border like the Mexican border.

Exactly!!