The Brutal and the Beautiful: Canada's Sovereign Techpower Era
How the Drone Era and Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy Are Rebuilding a Sovereign Economy — and Why It Matters to Investors
Author: Bill Cara —Fiduciary (retired) | Weekly Global Market Navigator
Research Contributor: Maj. Daniel R. DeNeve, U.S. Army — Operations Research & Systems Analyst, 3rd Infantry Division
Expert Correspondent: Glen Lynch, CEO — Volatus Aerospace Corp.
The Gemini team is speaking on my behalf to Canadians; however, the implications of Canada’s military policy pivot should be considered by global investors.
Why This Book, Why Now
On February 17, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced something Canada has never done before: a coherent, state-directed plan to transform defence spending into a national engine of economic growth. He called it the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS). I call it the starting pistol for the most consequential industrial transformation in Canadian history since the Second World War.
I am an 83-year-old fiduciary with more than 50 years in global capital markets. I have seen booms, busts, and everything in between. I have rarely seen a government policy document that simultaneously rewrites the rules for national security, economic development, industrial policy, and capital formation in a single stroke. This one does.
But a fiduciary’s first instinct is not enthusiasm—it is scrutiny. The numbers are large. The ambition is historic. The execution risks are equally historic.
This book grew from two conversations that arrived on the same day Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy document was released with much fanfare. The first was a letter from Glen Lynch, CEO of Volatus Aerospace, Canada’s leading drone company. His thesis was direct: “You’re right—warfare is transitioning from manpower to techpower.” The second was an analytical note from U.S. Army Major Daniel DeNeve, an operations research analyst and war veteran who has recently spent three years transforming how a 15,000-strong armoured division thinks about data. His perspective was equally direct, though from a different vantage point: elegant plans meet brutal friction. Always.
The tension between those two voices—the industrialist’s vision and the soldier’s realism—is the spine of this book. I have called it “The Brutal and the Beautiful.” It is not a comfortable title. It is not meant to be. A fiduciary cannot afford comfort where $500 billion in public capital is at stake.
What the Strategy Actually Does
The 2026 Defence Industrial Strategy commits $500 billion over the next decade to transform how Canada procures, builds, and owns its defence capabilities. For investors, three shifts matter most:
First, the money stays home. For decades, 75 cents of every Canadian defence dollar flowed to U.S. contractors. The new framework mandates that 70% of procurement spending—roughly $180 billion—go to Canadian-domiciled companies. This is not a preference. It is law.
Second, intellectual property is non-negotiable. Under the old regime, Canada routinely licensed technology from international defence contractors—paying indefinitely for equipment it could not modify, upgrade, or export without permission. The new rules require IP retention in Canada as a procurement condition. A firm that owns its IP can sell it globally. A firm that licenses it pays tribute forever.
Third, drones are the gateway. Among the ten designated “Sovereign Capability Areas,” uncrewed systems are the connective tissue running through everything else. They are the persistent eyes of Arctic surveillance, the data-gathering nodes of the sensor network, the delivery mechanism for digital command systems, and the test bed for AI autonomy. Start with drones, and the rest of the ecosystem reveals itself.
The Brutal: What the Policy Document Omits
Every elegant plan meets reality. Always.
Major DeNeve, who has lived this truth inside one of the U.S. Army’s most advanced fighting divisions, identifies the fractures the policy document does not address:
The supply chain beneath the strategy. Even sophisticated drone manufacturers outside China typically rely on Chinese industrial supply chains for precision sensors, cameras, and rare earth materials. Building Canadian sovereign drone capability while dependent on Chinese components is not sovereignty—it is sovereignty theatre.
The institutional friction. The Defence Investment Agency must grow from 85 to 400 staff while simultaneously managing the most complex procurement transformation in Canadian history. DeNeve’s 3rd Infantry Division’s data transformation—involving a fraction of this scale—required two years, extraordinary leadership patience, and acceptance of a messy, non-linear process.
The cultural question. DeNeve’s most uncomfortable challenge cuts deepest: “People fight—and die—for a national identity or shared values, not abstract concepts like an exclusive economic zone. Continued cultural balkanization erodes military prowess. A homogenous culture acts as a force multiplier, fostering cohesion and morale. Without popular will and unity, even superior tech crumbles.”
Clausewitz’s “remarkable trinity”—people, army, and government—requires all three to be in alignment. If Canada’s new military-industrial complex is built on government contracts without the cultural scaffolding to sustain it, the result is what DeNeve calls a “hollow force”: efficient on paper, brittle in crisis.
The Beautiful: What Becomes Possible
The same technology that enables a $1,000 drone to disable a $10 million armoured vehicle also enables a $50,000 drone to map mining exploration in weeks instead of years, inspect pipelines in hours instead of days, and deliver cargo to Arctic communities without burning aviation fuel on empty return flights.
This dual-use dividend is why the economic projections are not fantasy. The government’s target of 125,000 new high-paying defence-sector jobs by 2035 is ambitious—but it rests on genuinely new industrial capacity, not stimulus spending.
Glen Lynch’s Volatus Aerospace, formed through the 2024 merger with Drone Delivery Canada, is already building long-endurance platforms in Mirabel, Quebec—aircraft capable of up to seven days of continuous flight. This is the template the government intends to replicate across all ten sovereign capability sectors: Canadian companies, Canadian IP, Canadian production, global markets.
The Question That Remains
We are at the beginning of a cycle. Glen Lynch used that phrase to close his February 17 letter. It is the most important thing to understand about everything the DIS sets in motion.
Canada has decided—to stop being a spectator to its own economic destiny, to stop outsourcing its security to a neighbour whose interests may no longer align, to stop treating defence spending as a cost rather than a capital formation event.
Whether Canada can execute it is a question of friction. The beautiful precision of the drone ecosystem—its scalability, its IP-generating capacity, its ability to protect Canadian soldiers while extending Canadian economic reach—is real. So is the brutal difficulty of building the institutions, pipelines, and cultural will to sustain a transformation of this magnitude across a decade.
A fiduciary does not choose between beauty and brutality. A fiduciary accounts for both, prices both, and invests accordingly.
The deep research begins now. The argument is made. The question that remains—for Canada’s investors, its policy architects, and its people—is the sharpest one this book can offer.
Will Canada’s Techpower era forge a genuinely unified nation—or expose its deepest fractures?
Bill Cara is a recently retired US-licensed fiduciary and Canadian resident with more than 50 years in global capital markets. He publishes the weekly Navigator report and is the author of several books on investing, critical thinking, and independent analysis. ‘The Brutal and the Beautiful’ is slated to be published in the second quarter, 2026.