Higher Education and the Defence Industrial Strategy

How do colleges and universities fit within Canada’s defence boom?

Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) recognizes that higher education has an important role to play in fostering innovation, contributing to research and development, and reviving Canada’s defence industrial base. Colleges and universities, however, vary quite a bit when it comes to their awareness, readiness, and willingness to play this role. Many colleges and universities are defence-comfortable and have existing partnerships with the armed forces and defence industry. Others have fewer ties but are defence-curious, and still others are defence-reluctant.

This post is addressed to all colleges and universities, be they comfortable, curious, or reluctant about working with defence. My aim is to give higher ed a sense of how the DIS approaches higher education, and what colleges and universities can do to better align themselves with the Canadian government’s defence ambitions.

I’ll also address two obstacles standing in the way of greater cooperation between higher education and defence: the underfunding of post-secondary education and the opposition universities will face from students and faculty when contemplating closer involvement in military affairs.

To start, it’s worth reiterating what the DIS is all about. The DIS has big goals: greatly expanding the Canadian defence industrial base and strengthening Canadian innovation, supply chains, and control of intellectual property, and building sovereign capability to defend the country. To achieve these objectives, the Canadian military is expected to buy more capabilities from Canadian industry, the government will invest in small and medium businesses, and Ottawa will work closely with national champions in key sectors. All this is happening in a wider context of significantly increased defence spending, with the defence budget growing by $81.8 billion over the next five years.

Colleges and universities will contribute to this defence renaissance in a few ways, but they largely boil down to what higher education does already: research and training/teaching. Let’s break down what the DIS says about each of them.

Research

The DIS puts the existing Tri-Council funding agencies — National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)— at the forefront of its academic research agenda. We should therefore expect the Tri-Council to develop new security and defence related initiatives and grants. The DIS also highlights the $1.6 billion that has already been allocated to attracting top international researchers to Canadian universities, including in areas that contribute to defence and dual-use research and development.

DND currently funds social scientific and humanities research through the Mobilizing Insights into Defence and Security (MINDS) program, and technological innovation work through the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program. The DIS seems to indicate that IDEaS and related programs will be adapted to better leverage and fund academic research. MINDS might get more funds, too, since DND and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) will want more social scientific research on issues ranging from procurement to the defence industrial base to threat anticipation and technological adaptation. There’s so much that could be done through direct DND funding, that it really depends on how ambitious the department is and how much the government prefers to leave with the Tri-Councils.

The core of the government’s defence research efforts, however, will be the Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science (BOREALIS). It will “play a central role in coordinating and accelerating defence research and innovation, particularly in frontier technologies such as AI, quantum, and cybersecurity…” BOREALIS will also “establish a national network of Defence Innovation Security Hubs-sites where security cleared academic researchers can better collaborate with government and industry in a secure environment.” To get a sense of what these DISHs will look like, we should look at the one being set up at COVE Ocean in Nova Scotia. The DISHs may be reminiscent of the kind of closeknit academic-defence collaboration we saw in the Second World War and early Cold War, albeit on a much smaller scale.

To better connect government and universities in the defence space, moreover, the DIS announces the establishment of a Science and Research Defence Advisory Council. This Council will “work to strengthen collaboration with the research community, explore areas of alignment with defence priorities, and integrate incubators and test centres into national defence innovation pipelines.” The composition of this Council will be noteworthy when it comes together.

What does the DIS tell us about what kinds of research will be prized or encouraged? The DIS’s discussion of sovereign capabilities and its overarching policy goals suggests that fields like these will be of particular interest:

· Aerospace engineering

· Mechanical engineering

· Maritime engineering

· Computer science

· Artificial intelligence

· Quantum computing

· Biomedical engineering

· Physics

· Immunology, microbiology, molecular biology, and virology

· Project management and procurement

· Military, defence, and strategic studies

· Cybersecurity and operations

These are not exhaustive, of course, but they should give university leaders an idea of which faculties and faculty members could enhance their defence partnerships.

Training

Workforce development is arguably the most important contributor to Canada’s defence ambitions and the success of the DIS. Indeed, the DIS establishes a Canada Defence Skills Agenda. This agenda is focused on four priorities: 1) building defence industry talent; 2) investing in urgent defence sector skills; 3) increasing the supply of skilled labour; and 4) partnering with provinces and Indigenous communities to develop Canada’s defence workforce.

No matter how much the government invests in defence and defence industry, Canada’s ability to achieve its objectives will ultimately come down to people. Without skilled tradespeople, defence infrastructure won’t be built up as needed. Without a vast array of engineers, scientists, managers, accountants, and so forth, Canada will struggle to build and maintain capabilities for the CAF. Without enough technicians and supply chain managers, the new fleets that are built for the CAF won’t have the high levels of readiness and serviceability they need to operate effectively. And without enough training and advanced education, the CAF won’t have personnel who are properly educated to fight in rapidly evolving technological spaces, be it on land, at sea, in the air, in space, or across networks.

To give an example of what I mean here, consider the submarines Canada is planning to acquire. The human resources side of acquiring, operating, and maintaining up to twelve submarines is simply massive, a point that was reinforced at the recent Conference of Defence Associations Institute force development workshop on the Canadian Patrol Submarine Project. We are currently short of the skills and professions needed to pull it off. We’ll need to spend the next decade working incredibly hard to prepare ourselves for these submarines. Part of the solution will involve bringing over professionals from submarine operating states, notably close allies such as the United Kingdom and the country (Germany or South Korea) we buy the submarines from, to help us. But the main thrust will need to come from Canada’s colleges and universities.

Implementing the DIS and enabling the CAF to absorb a core defence budget of 2% to 3.5% of GDP will increase demand for these professions in the defence sector (again, not exclusive):

· Skilled trades of various sorts

· Technicians and mechanics

· IT specialists

· Defence and project management

· Supply chain management and logistics

· Engineers of nearly all sorts

· Lawyers of various kinds

· Defence and intelligence analysts

· Accountants, actuaries, and auditors

· Human resource managers

· Medical professionals

Colleges and universities from across the country should be looking at its programs to evaluate how well-positioned they are to help meet this demand. For all the talk about a declining interest in college and university education, and all the fears of AI taking over white-collar professions, the reality is that we’ll need far more people with a post-secondary education as we ramp up defence spending and the defence industry. The trades will certainly be in high demand, and AI may help streamline a lot of the work, the demand for university-educated professionals working will be increased by the DIS.

Challenges

Having laid out the opportunities the DIS presents for colleges and universities, I’ll conclude by noting two big challenges.

First, while defence spending and the DIS are federal initiatives and responsibilities, education is a provincial one. Provinces have been underfunding colleges and universities, which will make it much harder for the post-secondary sector to meet defence needs and expectations. And in the interest of fairness, it should be noted that the federal government is compounding this problem with its immigration and international student policies. Ontario is reinvesting in the post-secondary system, but institutions will still be operating on shoestring budgets.

The challenge here is pretty simple: when colleges and universities are underfunded, they can’t offer the programs needed to train and educate the workforce the defence sector needs, and they can’t hire the researchers we expect to advance and develop technological innovations in cooperation with government and industry. To be blunt, the underfunding of post-secondary education not only threatens the government’s planned defence build-up and industrial ambitions, it also risks becoming a national security and sovereignty problem. A financially precarious post-secondary sector can’t effectively address the human resource demands we’re building up in defence, and we won’t be able to effectively develop advanced, sovereign technologies and innovations if we fail to support university research.

Second, many universities are defence-reluctant because they worry about how faculty and students will react to deeper cooperation with defence or anything military. Universities, moreover, spent the better part of a decade presenting themselves as paragons of progressive virtue, which makes it tough to pivot toward a conservative-coded sector like defence. I suspect more than a few university administrators want to do more in defence, while not having anything to do with, you know, weapons and war. That’s a tough needle to thread, folks.

What should universities do about this challenge? Above all, respect the right of students to protest and the academic freedom of faculty. Let your students protest defence research and partnerships with defence industry. Let your faculty exercise their academic freedom, criticizing the move toward more of a defence focus on campus. They may win the argument and make it too difficult for your institution to get involved. C’est la vie. They might also lose the debate, though. Students who want to pursue a career in defence and related sectors can exercise their rights as well, notably their right to enrol at institutions that offer them the programs they want and are likely to lead to gainful employment. And academic freedom goes the other way for faculty: professors have the academic freedom to research issues that contribute to the defence of Canada and Canadian defence industry. Academic leaders should have the courage to support them when they do.

So, let the defence-reluctant institutions stay that way if they wish. The defence-curious may discover that there’s a lot of important work to do, and the defence-comfortable are already leading the way. For those colleges and universities that want to get involved, now’s the time to come up with a defence strategy that aligns with the DIS and the government’s planned defence expenditures.