The Canadian Joint Forces Command (CJFC) was established on 25 November 2025 to strengthen leadership, coordination, and accountability for joint capabilities across the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). Its purpose is to bring together the people, systems, and expertise required to build and manage capabilities that span land, sea, air, cyber, space, and the information environment.

As a new service-like command, CJFC has an opportunity, and an obligation, to be adaptive, forward-looking, and unencumbered by mindsets that slow institutional learning. We are focused on capabilities that do not fit neatly within a single environmental service, and on doing things faster for the benefit of the Joint Force. 

One of the most urgent capabilities we must accelerate is Joint Uncrewed Systems (JUxS) across all domains. The CAF has decades of experience with uncrewed systems, but much of that experience has remained fragmented. We have not yet created a fully integrated, end-to-end capability in which systems are embedded in our warfighting concepts, concepts of operations, and the broader Command, Control, Communications, Cyber, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance, and Targeting (C5ISRT) enterprise. That is the gap CJFC is working to close. 

On 23 July 2026, our team launched the Defence Drone Initiative (DDI) as a first step toward accelerating the development, testing, and production of Canadian JUxS for the CAF and the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG). The DDI is designed to create a faster pathway from concept to operational testing and, where requirements are met, into production.

In close collaboration with the Defence Investment Agency (DIA), CJFC established a Request for Supply Arrangement (RFSA) in record time. Similar Supply Arrangements have previously taken two years to establish; this one is being advanced in two months. By the close of the RFSA on 14 August 2026, we had received applications from 527 companies with over 1000 bids, a level of interest that reflects both the strength of Canada's innovation base and the urgency of the operational problem. 

The Supply Arrangement will establish a list of pre-qualified vendors, enabling DND/CAF to access UxS, Counter-UxS, and supporting technologies more rapidly. JUxS is one of the key sovereign capabilities identified in the Defence Industrial Strategy, and our objective is clear: reduce development and procurement timelines from years to months and, where possible, to weeks.

The DDI is not limited to platforms. It is intended to build an ecosystem for an end-to-end capability through five mutually reinforcing streams: JUxS systems; command, control, communications, data, electronic warfare, and cyber; integration, interoperability, and engineering; test, evaluation, and training; and innovation and experimentation. 

For generations, defence procurement has been shaped by the search for the perfect solution. Requirements were refined over years, risks were minimized through exhaustive analysis, and success was often measured by the delivery of sophisticated platforms designed to remain relevant for decades.

That approach made sense when technology evolved slowly and operational environments changed gradually. It is increasingly mismatched to the world in which military advantage is now won and lost by pushing innovation to the edge. Ukraine has demonstrated that JUxS capability is not simply about acquiring a drone. It is about creating the adaptive system around it. 

Ukraine's advantage has not rested on superior drones alone. It has come from a mature and responsive ecosystem that connects operators, manufacturers, software developers, electronic warfare specialists, and frontline feedback loops. That is innovation at the edge, and it is precisely the kind required to remain inside an adversary's OODA loop.

Increasingly, success belongs not to the force with the most exquisite equipment, but to the force that can observe, orient, decide, act, and adapt faster than its opponent. Technologies, software, tactics, payloads, countermeasures, and operating procedures now evolve on timelines measured in weeks and months, not years. A system that is highly effective today may be obsolete tomorrow. In such an environment, the ability to adapt continuously is more important than any individual piece of equipment. 

This reality requires a fundamental shift in how we think about capability development. The traditional pursuit of an exquisite end-state solution assumes that the future operating environment can be predicted with sufficient confidence before major procurement decisions are made.

That assumption is no longer safe. Instead of attempting to define the perfect system in advance, successful organizations are building processes that allow them to improve imperfect systems continuously. The decisive advantage is shifting from superior platforms alone to superior adaptation cycles. 

The nation that can move fastest from operational observation to experimentation, procurement, integration, deployment, and feedback will gain advantage over opponents trapped within slower institutional processes. Several allied nations have already recognized that autonomous systems are not merely a new category of equipment; they are forcing a new model of defence innovation. The importance of the DDI Marketplace should be understood in that light. Its real innovation is not only technological. It is institutional. 

By reducing procurement friction, expanding opportunities for experimentation, and sustaining a broad ecosystem of suppliers and innovators, the DDI Marketplace creates the conditions for continuous adaptation. Rather than placing one large bet on a small number of long-term decisions, Canada can place multiple smaller bets, learn from operational experience, scale what works, and discard what does not.

In rapidly evolving technological fields, the speed of learning is often more valuable than the certainty of prediction. We must approach force development with a venture-capital mindset, reframing failure as disciplined learning and using that learning to reach decisive returns faster. 

As the ecosystem matures, and as a digital marketplace is developed, we intend to push procurement decisions closer to the operational edge. End-users from combat units should help define evolving requirements, rather than relying solely on well-intentioned staff processes far removed from the tactical problem.

A well-designed marketplace can strengthen competition among manufacturers, incentivize better service and product improvement, and give suppliers clearer signals to forecast demand and scale production. It can also make the Joint Force a more intelligent customer by shortening the distance between operational need, industrial response, and institutional learning. 

Ultimately, the DDI represents something larger than a drone program. It signals the emergence of a new philosophy of capability development. The decisive capability of the future may not be a particular aircraft, vehicle, sensor, or software application. It may be an institution's ability to adapt continuously.

In an era of accelerating technological change, agility is becoming a capability in its own right, and perhaps the most important one of all. The countries that thrive will not necessarily be those that acquire the most sophisticated systems. They will be those that build the most adaptive ecosystems. 

That raises important questions for the Joint Force. When will Canada establish its own JUxS organization? Have we reached the point where this can no longer remain a side project within existing services? Is a dedicated division now required? Canada reached that point with a stand-alone Air Force in 1924, a Space Division in 2022, and a stand-alone Cyber Command in 2024.

The lesson is not that every emerging capability requires a new institution by default. It is that, at decisive moments, structure must follow strategic reality. JUxS may now be one of those moments.