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 Those assumptions are no longer valid.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.
The issue is time: the time between being discovered and being targeted. The time between when a headquarters can command and when it becomes a targeting point. The time between declaring a movement and becoming a target.
Survival requires dispersion, deception, mobility, and an entire operating paradigm built on the idea that you are observed all the time. The Canadian Army knows about the emergence of drones, ISR, and digital exposure, but it has not yet internalized the ways that they change land warfare’s fundamentals.
Attrition Has Returned—and Canada Is Not Ready
Precision fires promised surgical, inexpensive war. In reality, they have intensified attrition: the ability to strike targets more often, more reliably, and more predictably. Ukraine has demonstrated the scale of this shift: modern war is industrial, not surgical. It consumes people, equipment, ammunition, drones, and spare parts at rates far beyond what most Western forces planned for in peacetime, as shown by studies of wartime industrial demand.
The Canadian Army is not designed for this reality. It is small and brittle. It is optimized for controlled, expeditionary contributions, not for open-ended, high-intensity conflict. Ammunition stocks are low. Maintenance capacity is thin. Replacement cycles are slow. Mobilization—across industry, reserve forces, and training pipelines—is largely theoretical, even as official modernization documents highlight the fragility of the current model.
You can have a small and lethal army if it is small and lethal through design and deliberate choice. You cannot have a small, hollow, and unprepared army if it has to fight for extended periods. In an attritional war, those features are decisive.
Sustainment as a Front-Line Fight
The rise of long-range strike, drones, and cyber means that the old rear area is no more. Supply lines are now a front-line fight from start to finish. Supply depots, railheads, ports, repair facilities, and fuel infrastructure are all high-priority targets. If an enemy cannot stop forward brigades, it will attempt to starve them. Analyses of modern logistics under fire emphasize that industrial capacity and resilient supply networks—not efficiency—determine strategic endurance.
An army for the future must be able to fight under conditions of intermittent resupply, contested and damaged infrastructure, disrupted and overloaded communications, and near-constant threats to supply lines. Planning and organization must prioritize resilience, redundancy, and regeneration rather than peacetime efficiency and timeliness.
The Canadian Army still plans as if reliable resupply were a given and rear areas could stay intact. The moment a capable adversary enters the fight, those assumptions are shattered.
Hellbound and Down 