How Canada Squandered Its Drone Lead

On June 1, 2025, innocent-looking transport trucks rolled into assigned positions on the outskirts of remote Russian military airfields. The trucks carried metal storage units. By remote signal, the containers sprang open and released a swarm of armed drones, each hardly larger than a backpack. One by one, they whirred into the sky—117 in all—and slipped into formation. The armada flew low, and as they reached their targets, explosions engulfed the frames of parked aircraft.

Operation Spiderweb, eighteen months in the making, was Ukraine’s most audacious drone strike to date. According to Ukrainian government sources, as much as a third of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s strategic bomber fleet, spread over four airbases, was wiped out in a single attack. That level of precision and ambition didn’t come out of nowhere.

Ever since it first stared down massive armoured columns headed for Kyiv in February 2022, Ukraine has been the world’s innovator in drone warfare. Facing a larger enemy, with a greater military capacity, the country needed an asymmetric response—essentially a low-cost way to hit back against tanks, command centres, even naval ships. The country started with Turkish-made Bayraktar drones, a steady supply of commercial models, and desperate ingenuity. Today, they’ve turned the small machines into a national industry, built to scout and strike targets at scale. Astoundingly, the Ukrainians manufactured more than 1 million drones in 2024.

The Kremlin has been playing catch-up, aided by the so-called “axis of authoritarians,” including Iran and China. Russian military now fields its own version of Iranian drones—propeller-driven birds in black paint, called the Geran—mass-produced in factories far from the front lines. Russian drone strikes against Ukraine have dramatically escalated in 2025. An attack in late May utilized a total of 355 drones. In another attack a month later, at the end of June, targeting multiple Ukrainian cities, the Russians fired a massive volley of 477 drones. The scale of attacks has only increased since then.

This has made the war in Ukraine, already one of the most serious and sustained military conflicts since World War II, the greatest laboratory for drone use the world has ever seen. The two foes are locked in a spiralling race to deploy the most effective attack drones in the greatest numbers, alongside the best counter-drone systems. Offence and defence go hand in hand.

For the Canadian army, the war in Ukraine has become both a blueprint and a wake-up call for drone usage. Not only has the weapon proven indispensable across every combat scenario, Ukraine’s battlefield experience shows that ignoring the threat can leave critical infrastructure, troops, and supply lines exposed. Latvia, where Canada leads a North Atlantic Treaty Organization multinational brigade, serves as our own laboratory for the weapon. The deployment, Canada’s largest overseas military effort, is on Russia’s doorstep. Should Putin ever succeed in devouring Ukraine, the Baltic states, long independent from Moscow, could be next. The proximity has forced Canada to acquire armed drones and counter-drone systems to protect its forces, while closely studying Ukrainian tactics about how to effectively use the arsenal.

As it rushes to equip its Latvian contingent with drone systems, many purchased off the shelf from foreign suppliers, the Canadian army also wants to introduce the weapon to combat units back home. But the military is in a bureaucratic bind. The rules that allow it to acquire equipment on an emergency basis for the Latvian contingent cannot be used to equip the army at home. Building that capacity from scratch—after decades of underinvestment in unmanned systems—is proving daunting, underscoring how long Canada has been on the sidelines of this technological shift.

The sidelines, however, are not where we began. Canada was a pioneer in military drones. This, a forgotten piece of our history, suggests something of our innate capabilities and holds promise for a return to innovative ways.

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In every modern conflict, new technology emerges to change the battle space. Think of the hulking first-generation tank, churning across the mud and trenches in Flanders in World War I; the U-boat menacing global shipping in both world wars; the German rocket attacks on London and the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II; the F-86 Sabre fighter jet during the Korean War; and the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, which locked Cold War belligerents into a state of mutually assured destruction and cultural dread.

In our era, it is the drone. The ultimate “attritable” weapon, it is mass produced, cheap, and intended for one-way missions and then the garbage dump. As a technological game changer, we haven’t seen its like.

They come in all shapes and sizes, from miniature, hand-held devices powered by tiny propellers to large, futurist aircraft shapes. They can have limited range and endurance, or extremely long—minutes to hours, a few kilometres of flying to thousands. Their uses are as varied: surveilling borders, maintaining a watch on illegal fishing, keeping an aerial eye on migrant smuggling. They can also monitor climate change impacts, watch for forest fires and severe flooding, and catalogue land use and agricultural productivity.

That same versatility has made them indispensable to modern militaries. Compared with fighter jets, surveillance aircraft, or even satellites, drones are far more affordable and quicker to deploy. Some carry cameras and other sensors in “pods.” Such drones can have an essential intelligence mission called ISR (short for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Some carry payloads, from simple grenade-like explosives to air-to-air missiles. They can operate individually or as a pack with the power to overwhelm air defences and carry out devastating raids. In their deadliest form, they are killers.

The military drone traces its lineage through a surprising Canadian chapter. During the 1960s, Canadair (now Bombardier) manufactured a prototype launched from a truck bed with a booster rocket. The technology of the day posed some limits. It could follow only a pre-programmed route. It used film cameras for surveillance, and the drone parachuted back to earth for recovery, its landing cushioned by inflatable airbags (crashes were frequent). This machine, called the CL-89, was crude by today’s standards, but it proved that remotely piloted vehicles could play an active role in Cold War surveillance. It was among the first drones widely fielded by NATO forces. Its successor, the CL-289, improved on its design with greater range and imaging capabilities, serving well into the 1990s.

Canadair sold its drone systems to the French and German governments in 1987, capping a twenty-five-year period during which Canadian firms were recognized as leaders in military drone technology. But without sustained government investment or procurement, that early advantage started to fade. Much of the credit shifted abroad—to Israeli battlefield innovations in the ’80s and to the US in the ’90s. Both of those countries were laying the groundwork for what drones would become: sleek, sensor-packed weapons. When Canada embraced drone warfare again, it did so by rediscovering a capability it had once helped invent.

What sparked renewed interest was the war in Afghanistan. An initial deployment of Canadian special forces troops in late 2001 was followed by a bigger NATO-led deployment to Kandahar—and a challenging fight with the Taliban. On the ground, troops found themselves fighting a difficult-to-spot enemy, in harsh terrain, and always susceptible to ambushes and attacks from improvised explosive devices. The urgent need for force protection, and the growing awareness of US success with their Predator drones, which were capable of real-time surveillance and precision strikes, led the Canadian military to adopt a rent-a-drone approach.

The initial acquisition, in small numbers, of the French-made SAGEM Sperwer was not a success—the drone, powered by a modified Ski-Doo engine, proved unreliable, difficult to land, and hard to reuse. Canada then bought an Israeli-made mini drone called the Skylark, small enough to be operated by individual soldiers in the field. These short-range, tactical machines were far from universal kit—only select units got them. Nonetheless, they offered a tantalizing glimpse of what unmanned systems could do. That sense of possibility grew with the arrival of the longer-range Israeli Heron, capable of covering huge stretches of the battlefield and staying aloft for extended periods. Its strategic reach was reserved for specific missions, but when it was in the air, troops with access had a new and thrilling kind of support.

When Canada ended its Afghanistan combat mission in 2011, the urgency around drone acquisitions died as well. Running in the background was something called the Joint Unmanned Surveillance and Target Acquisition System—or JUSTAS. The program was designed to explore the acquisition of long-range drones for both international and domestic missions. That meant looking at ways of retooling the tech for Canada’s remote geographic needs: drones would need to fly long distances in frigid airspace and remain reliable even when satellite connections lagged or failed altogether in the Arctic; they would have to have patrol capacity across our ocean frontiers.

The Canadian Armed Forces did tests and pondered, but the process stalled. Meanwhile, other countries forged ahead. The US had long normalized drone warfare with Predator and Reaper fleets, the latter a larger, faster, more heavily armed drone, with greater endurance, payload, and strike capability. Israel had become a global exporter of drones, and even mid-tier powers like Turkey and Iran were quickly building and deploying their own systems. But JUSTAS stayed in a holding pattern. No request for proposals was issued, no concrete bids were solicited. Despite the lack of momentum, senior military officials appeared untroubled. In 2013, the head of the Royal Canadian Air Force told a Senate committee that the program was still in the phase of assessing options and defining future needs.

The assessing and defining kept on. (The program even got a new name: Remotely Piloted Aircraft System, or RPAS.) The Canadian government finally announced, in December 2023, that it would acquire eleven MQ-98 Reaper drones from the US firm General Atomics, for a price tag of $2.49 billion. But the timeline is glacial. This slow march to acquiring long-range drone capability is emblematic of the ways in which Canada slipped from being a drone pioneer to sitting on the sidelines, watching the technology develop. Maybe the idea was that we could wait and watch until the pace of technological change slowed and we could then jump on board and acquire a perfect drone system. If so, it was a ludicrous notion.

The first Reaper units won’t arrive until 2028, and retrofitting them for long-range Arctic patrols could delay full operational readiness until 2033. JUSTAS will be done, I guess, some thirty-three years after its start.

The urgency for drones has come back with a vengeance. This is not an Afghanistan moment; it is a bigger, more long-term, more dangerous geopolitical environment. It’s a world shaped by Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s military buildup in the Indo-Pacific, and the weaponization of trade routes. In that world, the rise of swarming, low-cost combat drones is a prospect that can shift the balance in any fight.

The CAF, however, is starting with a largely empty cupboard. It needs drones of all types: small tactical devices for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering; options to serve as loitering munitions for attacks; medium- and long-range machines with dual-use capabilities to spy and fight; and, ultimately, unmanned versions to serve alongside piloted fighter jets to combine capabilities and maybe one day replace crewed aircraft altogether.

Attention is finally being paid to the experiments that Nordic militaries are making to equip their drones, adapting batteries, sensors, and airframes to withstand temperatures that would ground most commercial systems. The Arctic is our laboratory. Lieutenant General Michael Wright, as army commander, wants to get drones into the hands of the Rangers, a storied and Indigenous self-defence force, as soon as possible. He came to see the value of the technology in Kandahar, in 2006, when he was a young company commander and the fighting was intensifying. He said that whatever the CAF might have had at the time, he and his soldiers didn’t benefit from it. But he was aware of the American Hellfire missile–armed Predator drones used to hunt Taliban and al-Qaeda targets. “What a difference it would have made for us,” he said, looking back, “to have the ability to send drones out front to try to see, as opposed to marching through grape fields to see if we ran into anyone.”

Equipping the Rangers with drones means the army can learn directly from those who operate in the Arctic year round. The Rangers already act as the military’s eyes and ears across the North, threading snowmobiles across ice-choked straits and piloting small boats through frigid seas, often in places so remote they don’t appear on most maps. Drones could extend their reach, spotting ice hazards, illegal vessels, or even foreign military intrusions long before a patrol could arrive—and do so without risking lives. For a country with the world’s second largest Arctic territory to protect, drones can help keep Canada intact.

While Ranger feedback would be invaluable in refining drone designs for conditions that can plunge below minus forty degrees, field testing is possible only if manufacturing delivers the goods. Canada must pivot to a genuine defence industrial base. That’s the thinking behind Prime Minister Mark Carney’s push to expand domestic production and loosen our dependence on the US military-industrial complex. And when it comes to drones, all major powers are racing to scale up; Ukraine plans to turn out 4 million from its own factories in 2025 alone. Russia is trying to match those numbers.

Fortunately, Canada already has a foundation for a homegrown drone industry, one tuned to the country’s distinctive needs. The commercial sector includes roughly 1,000 companies involved in production and sales, with a share of start-ups in the mix. The question is obvious: If that capacity exists, why not leverage it to build the arsenal our military needs? The risks of outside reliance are already clear. One Canadian counter-drone company was ordered to dissolve after officials determined its ties to Chinese entities posed a national security risk.

The answer is we can build drones at scale, but lots of barriers have to come down. Kevin Toderel is the founder of a drone manufacturer called RMUS (Rocky Mountain Unmanned Systems). Less than a decade old, RMUS began as a hobby supplier. Now the company is in full swing. RMUS’s clients range from firefighters to search-and-rescue teams. Its website doesn’t mention defence, but Toderel tells me sales to the CAF comprise about 60 percent of his business.

Toderel owes his success, he says, to being “faster, more flexible, and, generally speaking, orders of magnitude less expensive.” He’s comparing himself to a traditional defence sector supply chain—involving things like fighter jets, tanks, warships—which is dominated by massive foreign contractors and is almost entirely American. The drone market is younger, less consolidated. Scrappier firms can still break in. With the breakneck pace of technological change, smaller can mean more innovative, more creative, more adaptable. Companies like RMUS can work directly with CAF operators, tweaking designs in real time, not over years, and providing fast delivery.

Paul Ziadé is another Canadian innovator and manufacturer of drone systems for the military. He wears two hats: professor of engineering at the University of Calgary and chief executive officer at a defence technology start-up called North Vector Dynamics. NVD makes CUAS, or counter-drone systems—and it makes them in Canada. CUAS systems are designed to track, intercept, jam, deflect, and shoot down attacking hostile drones. As drones become more accessible, these defence tools are becoming essential. To protect not just military bases but also airports, public events, and critical infrastructure. He is passionate about his company’s products, which aim to be, as he told me, “very low cost.”

Ziadé’s optimism comes with a warning. Canada is well behind in the race to develop drone technology, and without faster procurement and serious investment, he fears we’ll stay there. Defence contracts provide the stability early-stage companies need to develop and refine advanced systems. While interest is growing—RMUS’s and NVD’s military contracts are proof of that—there continues to be broad reluctance to back domestic innovators. When then defence minister Bill Blair revealed last February that Canada would provide Ukraine with over 800 SkyRanger R70 multi-mission drones, they were being built by Teledyne FLIR, a US-owned branch plant. Our ingrained habit is to look abroad for solutions. Still, Ziadé shares Toderel’s belief that drones represent a rare opportunity: a field “where we can lead, not follow.”

That opportunity won’t be won through building just the hardware. Wings, engines, and fuselage are disposable and, to a certain extent, low tech. The real value is in the brains of the system, the software: AI that can navigate complex terrain, detect targets, encrypt communications, and fend off jamming attacks. This is where Canada can shine. With our dense cluster of AI researchers, cybersecurity talent, and advanced communications labs, the country is unusually well equipped to wire the nervous systems of tomorrow’s fleets for the Canadian military and for allies and partners.

But commercial and industrial drone markets aren’t enough to make this happen. Military interest is what drives standards, testing opportunities, and export potential. Without it, we squander a rare second chance. With it, we become builders of the future.

Michael M. Smith has a solution. He is the chief operating officer for a venture capital firm called One9. On its website, One9 has a catchy phrase: “Venture Capital is a Special Operation.” The founder, Glenn Cowan, was formerly a special operations soldier with Canada’s Joint Task Force 2. He served on multiple missions in Afghanistan before leaving the army. Cowan created the company twelve years ago, and its mission remains unique: to pool private capital and invest in Canadian defence start-ups. NVD, Ziadé’s company, is part of its portfolio.

Capital, Smith told me, is one of the three “C”s in the Canadian defence manufacturing ecosystem. The other two are competency and customers. Competency, he says, “we have in spades.” By this, he means the ability to imagine, design, and manufacture. Capital and customers—not so much. The main customer, whether for drones or other military equipment, is, of course, the government. As a customer, the government gets bad marks—not reliable, not agile, complacently dependent on the US for its needs, way too risk averse. In one word, according to Smith, “sclerotic.”

That has to change. The problem isn’t just money. It’s mindset. The military has long been treated as a sector too morally fraught or unwholesome to be part of the larger story of Canadian innovation. But what if defence were the catalyst? What if, instead of shying away, banks and major investment firms built a public-private model that embraced defence as a proving ground for ingenuity: a space where necessity drives invention and invention reshapes what Canada is capable of? The global drone industry, worth about $40 billion (US) in 2025, is expected to reach $90 billion (US) by 2030. It’s defence policy and industrial strategy—and a chance to get both right at once.

Canada has led in drones before. We can again. The military’s message is blunt: drones are an indispensable part of how armies now think and move. The Ukraine war has made the lesson impossible to miss. As Wright told me, “We need to equip the Canadian army soldiers with the technology of their generation.” But this new arms race is being fought on assembly lines as much as in combat zones. And the market isn’t just military. It’s agriculture, construction, disaster relief—everything. Building a vibrant dual-use drone industry could deliver huge long-term economic gains. For Canada, it’s a back-to-the-future moment.