Big Budgets, Bigger Ambitions
Navy considers Canadian-built amphibious landing ship for Arctic operations
🎯 Three-Shot Burst
Murray Brewster reports Canada’s navy is quietly exploring an ambitious idea: a Canadian-built, ice-capable amphibious landing ship designed to move troops, vehicles, and aid across the Arctic without relying on ports.
Why it matters: Still officially a “thought exercise,” the concept is gaining traction thanks to rising defence budgets and early talks with Davie and Seaspan, both already building polar-class vessels. Such a ship would act as a mobile Arctic base—bolstering sovereignty, disaster response, and military reach in a region with almost no year-round ports. After decades of false starts, the combination of NATO pressure, Arctic geopolitics, and fresh money may finally push the idea out of theory and into steel.
Bottom Line: Sovereign capability is about control without permission. That’s the core of why this matters. In the Arctic, Canada’s sovereignty problem isn’t legal—it’s practical. We claim the territory, but in winter we often cannot physically get there, stay there, or respond there without help.
An ice-capable amphibious ship changes that in three concrete ways — it collapses the tyranny of infrastructure, it demonstrates sovereignty (international law rewards use and administration, not PowerPoint presentations), and it breaks strategic dependence on allies for heavy lift, sealift, and sustainment in extreme environments.
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⚔️ Combat Readiness
Canada Is Building the Wrong Army for the War That Is Coming
Andrew Latham argues that the next major land war will not reward elegance, boutique modernization, or the comforting belief that advanced technology can replace mass and endurance. It will expose armies built on fragile assumptions. Concealment has largely disappeared.
Attrition has returned as a central fact of combat. Sustainment shapes outcomes as decisively as firepower. Yet the Canadian Army remains organized, equipped, and intellectually anchored to a vision of warfare that belonged to yesterday’s world. The problem is not a simple modernization lag or a lack of new kit. It is a deeper conceptual failure—a refusal to absorb how radically and irreversibly the character of land warfare has changed.
Arctic pitch: Canada’s geography adds to the problem. The Arctic is no longer a distant, largely theoretical frontier. It is now a theatre of competition defined by opposing surveillance architectures, long-range strike systems, and critical infrastructure vulnerabilities—conditions mapped in recent assessments of Arctic security.
Bottom line: A conceptual failure cannot be solved by bolt-on solutions. What is needed is redesign. Force structure, reserves, sustainment, mobilization, training, and even strategic purpose must be rethought. This means jettisoning some assumptions that have been bedrock in Canadian defence since the Kosovo and Afghanistan era. It also means facing political realities about cost, scale, and what it is to be a responsible nation in this new moment.
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Impressive breakdown of why the amphib concept matters for Arctic sovereignity. The point about "control without permission" is exactly right. I watched something similiar play out in logistics when companies only realized infrastructure gaps during crisis situations. Breaking the dependency chain on ports fundamentally changes the operational calculus up North.