CDSN Meets NDHQ, 2026 Edition

The lighting always sucks in this part of DND,
but this is only place we can do this.

 One of the highlights of every year is the Canadian Defence and Security Network's Summer Institute.  Ripping off SWAMOS and BtG, we organize a weeklong workshop to discuss Canadian defence and security stuff with a mixed audience--roughly one third emerging scholars, one third military folks, and one third government types.  The idea is not just to have all of us discuss and learn about these issues, but to learn how the various folks in the defence and security community think about this stuff.  That the exchanges among the three groups are as important as the stuff they hear from our speakers.  It is the hardest thing we do each year as involves lots of planning, herding academic and non-academic cats, and it is a very intense week for our CDSN team.  It is also perhaps the most rewarding thing we do, as we see the lightbulbs go off and we see connections developing.  

Almost since the start, a day at Canada's defence headquarters has been on the agenda.  It started with a couple of talks and now has grown to a full day of briefings and roundtables.  I am as amazed every year with us getting high-level speakers as our participants are amazed at the quality of my cookies.  In most years, we get a chance to speak with the Deputy Minister of Defence, who as a general rule does not do that much public speaking (DM's across the government tend to not speak up that much, which in this realm, puts them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the Chief of Defence Staff).  I hadn't met Christiane Fox, so it was great to meet her and get her perspective.  We also met folks from the three elements/environments (what Americans call services), getting a good idea of how the Navy, Army, and Air Force folks are thinking about this moment--about the threats facing Canada, about the injection of money as Mark Carney has pushed far more spending towards defence, and, yes, the Trumpness of it all.

I kept asking the same question because I have a book chapter I need to write--what can the Canadian Armed Forces do without any American assistance.  And the answers, as one of the participants pointed out, illustrated a civ-mil divide that Phil Lagassé pointed out a while back: the military sees the moment as rhetoric and wants to continue business as usual and the civilians are identifying a fundamental break and want to operative differently.  Oh my.  Good for the chapter, bad for Canadian civil-military relations.

I must run off to our fourth day of the Institute, where one of our panels is, indeed, on civ-mil.