Ottawa’s inaction on the NGAD program is not merely embarrassing. It is dangerous—putting the foundations of Canada’s most important security partnerships at risk.
On one side of the US-Canada border, the United States is racing ahead with the F-47 and the broader sixth-generation NGAD program—constructing the aircraft and networks that will form the core of its future way of war. On the other, Canada has effectively chosen to remain parked at the fifth generation with the F-35. This would be concerning enough if the stakes were limited to lost procurement opportunities or missed industrial contracts. But they are not. By standing on the sidelines of the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, Canada is threatening the very foundations of its defense partnership with the United States, starting with NORAD and rippling outward across the North American security relationship writ large. None of this is in Canada’s national interest.
How Sixth-Generation Fighter Jets Will Work
Sixth-generation airpower is not about another incremental step in fighter capability. It is about building an integrated network of command, control, sensor fusion, and AI-enabled kill chains that will determine how warfare is waged in the 21st century. The platforms at the heart of these programs are not so much new fighters as airborne command nodes, which will need to operate at machine speed in a battlespace where the distinctions between air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum are intentionally and increasingly blurred. This is the guiding logic behind sixth-generation fighter development all over the world—America’s NGAD program, Europe’s Future Combat Air System (FCAS), and the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) now linking Britain, Japan, and Italy. Each program is less about the specific capabilities of the machines involved than it is about seizing control over the architecture of coalition warfare for decades to come. States that fail to stake out an early place in these ecosystems will not just be behind the curve. They will be locked out.
Canada is on the outside of the NGAD ecosystem looking in. Ottawa has no role in shaping the doctrine or military-technical requirements of NGAD. Canada’s firms have no share in the industrial benefits, and the country’s military leaders have no voice in how the architecture of sixth-generation airpower is being built. The costs of that absence will be heavy. In the NGAD era, “interoperability” will not mean flying compatible aircraft or radios that can talk to one another, but rather sharing integrated cloud-based systems, feeding sensor data into real-time AI engines, and trusting allies with mission-critical code.
Trust in each other’s software—and therefore in each other’s ability to make reliable use of that code on the battlefield—will have to be earned over time through co-development and co-production, not by buying a few dozen platforms off the shelf once the code is already written and frozen. Nor will the US combat cloud stretching from sea to space, from low Earth orbit to the hypersonic layer, slow down to accommodate Canadian platforms left out of code-level integration and unable to feed sensor data back into the wider network. Shared situational awareness will become a veneer. And once trust in that shared situational awareness starts to decay, the partnership itself begins to crumble as well.
Canada Was an Active Partner in America’s Defense. What Changed?
This is not remotely comparable to how Canada partnered with the United States on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. As a founding partner in that fifth-generation program, Canadian firms won billions of dollars in defense contracts, Canadian pilots gained access to emerging doctrine, and Ottawa received a seat at the design table. With NGAD, the situation is very different. Ottawa has passed on those options, and is choosing instead to play the role of a late-arriving customer—if even that. The contrast is obvious to Washington and other allies and partners: whereas Canada was a full participant in shaping the future of airpower in the past, it is a bystander today.
The implications for NORAD, the cornerstone of continental defence for over six decades, are especially stark. When NORAD was created in 1957, Canada was not merely along for the ride: it was at the center of the vision, which understood North America as a unified and indivisible whole. When the North Warning System was built in the 1980s, radar lines crossed the continent in arcs that bisected Canadian territory. Canadian and American officers worked side-by-side in a genuinely integrated command. And throughout the Cold War, Canadian fighters sat alongside American ones on alert as equal partners, defending North American airspace.
That model of binational cooperation became a global symbol of allied trust and confidence. But when NORAD’s architecture is being remade to address the threats of the 21st century—including hypersonic missiles, stealthy cruise systems, and cross-domain synchronization—Canada is not modernizing to the same standards as the United States. Washington is moving ahead with NGAD integration, and Canada is not.
Ottawa’s neglect is especially glaring when it comes to the Arctic. The northern approaches to North America are once again a zone of great-power competition. Russia continues to operate long-range bombers from Arctic bases, and new hypersonic glide vehicles that are capable of attacking North America over the pole are already entering service. China has announced itself a “near-Arctic power” and is making inroads with both influence operations and mapping of polar routes for commerce and military access. Geography makes Canada an indispensable part of continental defense, but without NGAD-level integration, that advantage risks becoming irrelevant. An air force unable to plug into next-generation command networks will not be able to defend the Arctic effectively, nor reassure Washington that Canada is serious about its own northern responsibilities.
This is not merely a technical problem, but also a strategic one. The United States does not run its alliances based on sentiment, nostalgia, or past contributions—particularly in the era of President Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his transactional worldview. Today, Washington measures and rewards contributions made today, and expects its partners to do the same. States that step up, take hard decisions, and invest in the capabilities of the future are given influence in return. Those that do not are marginalized and quietly pushed to the side.
Ottawa’s current position all but guarantees that Washington will see Canada in the latter camp. The long-term result could be the hollowing out of NORAD as a genuinely binational command. Ottawa would still be briefed, but only after the fact and with no say in decisions that really matter. At that point, the “joint” nature of North American defence will be more fiction than fact.
Canada Cannot Free-Ride Off of America Any Longer
This is where the true failure of Canada’s current path becomes clear. Canada’s political class has spent decades convincing itself that the United States will always foot the bill for continental defence. Governments on both sides have treated defense procurement as optional spending, and strategy as something to defer to its partners on. These governments seem to have fallen under the illusion that Canada could hedge its way through great-power competition—perhaps even relying on Russia and China to balance against each other, all while somehow magically sustaining its sovereignty without needing to pay for it.
That illusion is unraveling further each day. Washington has made clear that it is no longer willing to subsidize allied indifference or complacency. In an era of great-power competition, relevance must be earned. Other allies have heard this message loud and clear; Australia, Japan, South Korea, and even Finland are busy embedding themselves in sixth-generation ecosystems, whether through NGAD partnerings, European FCAS programs, or the Anglo-Japanese-Italian GCAP. They are buying access, building capability, and harmonizing doctrine. They are making sacrifices in order to ensure that they are not just consumers of American security but contributors to it. Canada is doing none of this.
The costs are not just strategic, they are industrial. NGAD, FCAS, and GCAP will dominate the defence marketplace for decades. The intellectual property associated with these programs will be tightly controlled, and access to contracts tightly rationed to those on the inside from the start. Canadian firms will not see another F-35-style bonanza. They will instead be reduced to the role of subcontractors, dependent on the goodwill of others. That might be tolerable in peacetime, but it would be catastrophic in wartime—when Canada would find itself with little leverage, few options to surge production of critical components, and mired in deep dependence on third parties.
The economic effects in this scenario will also have political effects. If Canadian industry is systematically locked out of the cutting edge, Ottawa will lose one of the few tools it has to justify large defense expenditures to the Canadian public—namely the benefits of such expenditures to the Canadian economy. Without contracts going to Canadian companies, creating Canadian jobs, domestic support for higher spending will decline even further. Canada’s political class, already allergic to defence investment, will find new excuses to defer and delay, kicking off a vicious cycle of weakness and strategic irrelevance.
Canada Cannot Put Off Defense Spending Any Longer
Policymakers in Ottawa might attempt to persuade themselves that the NGAD program and its European competitors are still years away from completion. This is no longer the case. NGAD prototypes are already in the air, engines are being tested, and early platforms are scheduled to enter service in the 2030s. FCAS demonstrators are in development, and GCAP partners are building toward their first test flights in the early 2030s. The architecture for sixth-generation airpower and the battle networks it will enable will be locked in long before that. By the end of this decade, those on the inside of the ecosystem will be in. Those on the outside will be out. Today, Canada still has options to reverse its irrelevance—but time is running short.
Those options require a change of mindset. Ottawa could lobby for observer status on NGAD. It could begin making investments in plug-in technologies—AI, advanced sensors, drone teaming, and so on—that would at least give Canada a semi-integrated role in the wider network. It could use NORAD modernization as a bargaining chip to secure meaningful participation. But none of this is possible if Canadian leaders continue to defer hard decisions, then depend on the United States to cover for them.
Ottawa’s inaction up to now is not merely embarrassing. It is dangerous—putting the foundations of Canada’s most important security partnerships at risk. If Canadian leaders do not reverse course and find a place for Canada inside the sixth-generation ecosystem, the country will come to be regarded as a free rider, a bystander, and ultimately a liability for North America’s defense. The blame for that state of affairs will rest squarely on the shoulders of the existing political class—so addicted to deferral, and so blinded by short-term calculation, that it has chosen to gamble away Canada’s security and broader national interest at the very moment when both are more vital than ever.
About the Author: Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a senior Washington fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, where he focuses on military strategy, great power politics, and the future of warfare. His work has appeared in The National Interest, RealClear Defense, 19FortyFive, The Hill, and The Diplomat. He is also a tenured professor of International Relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
