The future of warfare is transforming before our eyes. As I witnessed at a recent defence and security conference, traditional military procurement strategies are being upended by the rapid evolution of AI and drone technology. The lesson from active conflicts is clear: we need to rethink our approach to defence systems from the ground up.
The Changing Battlefield
Militaries have traditionally planned in decade-long cycles, purchasing massive platforms with delivery expected 8-10 years after ordering. This paradigm is becoming obsolete as requirements shift before systems even arrive.
Ukraine offers powerful lessons. Drones are being deployed at unprecedented scale, with Ukrainians reportedly losing up to 10,000 commercial drones daily due to jamming and electronic warfare. These aren’t expensive, sophisticated platforms but relatively inexpensive tools that save lives by keeping humans away from direct combat.
This rapid evolution requires us to think differently about how we develop defence technology. How can we maintain an effective defence posture when our acquisition timeline is measured in years but threat evolution is measured in days?
The Innovation Challenge
When I recently attended a defence conference, I learned organizations are buying new drone capabilities and attempting to retrofit them for specialized environments like the Arctic. This approach is fundamentally flawed.
The Arctic presents a particularly challenging case—a harsh, hostile environment where standard technology simply fails. Extreme cold drains batteries rapidly. High winds make standard flight controls inadequate. The vastness demands extraordinary range and endurance.
What’s more concerning is the strategic importance of the Arctic itself. As climate change accelerates ice melt, it’s critical for Canada to secure its sovereignty from both economic and national security perspectives. And we must do so with technology specifically designed for our unique conditions.
First Principles Approach
We need to question fundamental assumptions and design systems specifically for their intended environment and purpose.
This first principles approach can be distilled into four key elements:
1. Environment-Specific Design: Rather than fighting against extreme conditions, design systems that leverage these conditions as advantages.
2. Mission-Driven Requirements: Define success based on actual operational needs, not by comparing to systems designed for entirely different contexts.
3. Resource Optimization: In hostile environments, resources like energy become precious. Fundamentally reconsider how resources are generated, stored, and utilized.
4. Autonomous Resilience: Systems must maintain mission capability when communication links are unreliable due to environmental conditions or jamming.
Applying these four first principles to Arctic drone development transforms our approach entirely. Rather than retrofitting existing platforms, we’d design surveillance systems specifically optimized for polar conditions from the start. The procurement cycle for these specialized drones may still take 2-3 years, but that gives us time to approach the problem thoughtfully.
Real-time Threat Detection
At Zighra, our contribution to this domain centers on electronic warfare — specifically sensing the environment, detecting threats, and alerting operators in real time. This approach is built on first principles thinking about threat detection.
Rather than incrementally improving existing methods, we asked: What is the fundamental nature of threats in electronic warfare? The answer: behavioral anomalies against a baseline of normal operation.
Our core technology can detect jamming or spoofing activities within split seconds. We create unique behavioral patterns of the current situation, allowing us to identify threats as they emerge. For entirely new threats, we can detect and classify them in under three seconds.
This capability addresses one of the most pressing challenges: maintaining operational awareness when communications are disrupted. When drones lose connection due to jamming, how can they navigate autonomously? This is extremely important as we move toward more autonomous systems that must operate reliably even when communications are compromised.
The Cybersecurity Imperative
As sensing capabilities become more advanced, traditional concealment becomes increasingly difficult. This shifts the adversarial advantage toward cybersecurity attacks—if an opponent can’t hide physically, they’ll attempt to compromise your systems remotely.
Applying first principles, we must ask: What is the fundamental vulnerability of AI-powered defence systems? The answer lies in the data pipeline that feeds decision-making.
For AI-powered defence systems, cybersecurity is foundational. Adversaries might try to poison training data, compromise models, or infiltrate systems to gather intelligence. These attacks can be launched from thousands of miles away.
At Zighra, my company that specializes in AI-powered defence solutions, we’ve applied first principles to address these challenges. Our approach examines the entire supply chain—ensuring data integrity, deploying anomaly detection to identify tampering, preventing model poisoning, and continuously authenticating users accessing these systems.
Ethics and Explainability
The ethical considerations of AI in defence applications cannot be overlooked. While various nations are establishing guardrails and regulations, the practical reality is complex. Will adversaries follow the same rules? How do you maintain ethical standards while still maintaining tactical advantages?
Applying first principles to ethics in AI means asking: What fundamental relationship should exist between automated systems and human decision-makers, especially when lives are at stake?
My perspective is that explainability must be central to any military AI system. When you build AI from scratch with transparency throughout, operators can understand why specific decisions were made. This becomes crucial if something goes wrong.
Some organizations treat AI as a black box that’s extensively tested before deployment. But this becomes problematic with truly adaptive systems that continue learning in the field. By prioritizing explainable AI, we ensure human operators understand what the system is telling them and can make informed decisions, maintaining ethical responsibility while still leveraging the speed and precision of AI.
Canada’s Defence Future: Act Now, Build Fast
For Canada to maintain its security and sovereignty, especially in the Arctic, we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to defence technology procurement.
The traditional model of ordering large defence platforms with decade-long timelines no longer aligns with the speed of technological evolution. By the time these systems arrive, adversaries will have iterated through multiple generations of AI-powered warfare technology. Yet, when urgent needs arise, we have shown the ability to fast-track investments—such as recent acquisitions for air defence and counter-drone capabilities. This demonstrates that agility in procurement is possible. Now, we must apply that same urgency to fostering homegrown AI, drone, and cybersecurity innovation, ensuring Canada leads in defence technology rather than just acquiring it.
The Arctic is increasingly contested, yet Canada’s defence procurement still operates on decade-long cycles. With adversaries advancing AI-powered capabilities at an accelerated pace, we must match speed with innovation and purpose.
To secure Canada’s sovereignty—especially in the Arctic—we must fundamentally rethink our approach to defence technology procurement:
- Accelerate the deployment of Arctic-ready AI defence solutions tailored to Canada’s unique operational environment.
- Expand partnerships with Canadian innovators in AI, cybersecurity, and electronic warfare — not only to deploy cutting-edge capabilities, but to develop sovereign intellectual property that strengthens our defence industrial base and ensures long-term technological independence.
- Adopt an agile, iterative approach to defence procurement, shifting from rigid, multi-year cycles to rapid experimentation and continuous innovation that can keep pace with evolving threats.
By embracing innovation and purpose-built solutions designed from first principles, we can ensure Canada’s defence remains robust in an uncertain future.
Canada’s security depends on Arctic innovation. The time for AI-driven defence is now.