Canada’s Army Knows It Is Not Ready for High-Intensity War — And The Senior General in Command Is Saying It Out Loud

“The Army we have is not the Army we need.” Canadian Lt. Gen Michael Wright has been saying that since last fall — at base visits, in podcasts, in planning documents — which isn’t how generals usually talk in public. He’s also betting that Inflection Point 2025 and the subsequent Canadian Army Modernization Plan can close the gap before anyone tests whether he’s right. And yes, that means in a war that Canada might not perform very well in at the moment.

Inflection Point 2025: Give the Plan Its Due

Canadian Tank Firing. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Inflection Point 2025, released last September, is serious work — an ambitious vision of a future army built around division-level warfighting, long-range fires, drone integration, and real Arctic capability. Wright looked at what Canada had built and called it “contribution warfare”: small, specialized packages handed to allied HQs to plug into larger operations. Afghanistan. Latvia. Professional and limited. Designed for an era that’s over.

What Inflection Point and the Modernization Plan propose instead is a purpose-driven force. A Manoeuvre Division in Edmonton as the primary combat formation, built for high-readiness major combat operations. A Defence of Canada Division in Montréal — Reserve-heavy, focused on homeland defence and Arctic presence. A Support Division in Kingston. A Doctrine and Training Centre. Three decades of regional administrative structure, demolished and rebuilt around function rather than geography.

Inflection Point lays out the argument for why change is necessary and what direction it should take. The Canadian Army Modernization Plan is how it should proceed in terms of structure, equipment, training, sustainment, and the realization of a fully digitized force by 2030.

That restructuring is the right call. It’s hard to argue with the aim. But aims and the capacity to realize those aims are different things, and the gap between the two may prove too wide for Canada to bridge.

Three Places the Gap Shows Up

Start with people, because it’s the most basic problem. The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) enrolled 7,310 Regular Force members in 2025-26 — the highest intake in over thirty years — and the Carney government deserves credit for pushing recruitment after years of letting it slide.

But new enrolments aren’t trained soldiers.

They’re people at the start of a pipeline. Canada’s Army Regular Force sits at roughly 22,000. The force Inflection Point envisions needs considerably more, and it needs people who’ve operated at that scale.

Getting them takes years. Reorganizing boxes on a chart is cheap. Manning those boxes isn’t. Not all of those boxes are equal, either. Signals, engineers, logistics — the trades that keep a division functioning past the first week of high-intensity operations — are where the CAF’s own numbers show the deepest holes. You can recruit infantry faster than you can grow a combat engineer with three years of field experience. The Army needs both.

Then there are the drones. MINERVA — the Modernization Strategy’s drone integration initiative — is the right response to what Ukraine has demonstrated on the battlefield. By spring 2026, it’s still in industry consultations, working through what the systems should actually do before buying them. Which is defensible as a process. But Ukrainian units have been running operational drone swarms for two years. Canada is still holding orientation days with manufacturers. That gap won’t close quickly. Two years of operators dying from the wrong call and adapting the next morning produced something you can’t requisition. It accumulates.

And the rifles. The C7/C8 has been in Canadian hands for more than thirty-five years. The replacement Canadian Modular Assault Rifle doesn’t arrive until 2027. An army attempting the biggest structural overhaul in a generation is doing it while soldiers carry a weapon that was new when the Berlin Wall came down. Nobody planned that situation deliberately. It’s still the situation.

The structural transition has its own timing problem. Division Modernization Teams are chasing Initial Operating Capacity — the minimum viable threshold for the new formation — sometime before year’s end. Full capability comes well after that. Meanwhile, four of one division’s seven major units are already locked into commitments running through mid-2026.

So the reorganization is happening with pieces of the force deployed elsewhere. That’s not unusual in large military transitions — but it is slow. One thing the Modernization Strategy actually delivered in April: all four Division Training Centres are now under a single command, shifting from a regional to a functional model. That helps force generation but doesn’t fix the timeline problem.

The 2% Problem

Canada officially hit NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence in 2025-26 for the first time since the Cold War.

That was a real milestone, and it took real political will from Carney to get there. But it’s still worth parsing that number: Canada barely crested the mark, and remains near the bottom of the alliance with Belgium, Spain, Albania, and Portugal.

And remember: NATO’s new magic number for core defence spending is 3.5%. Making that target will require cash to move through Canada’s woefully underspending procurement process. There are years between most budget promises and delivery of actual equipment, and the timelines won’t speed up because a minister — or even the prime minister — gives a speech.

What This Means Right Now

The candor coming from Army leadership — naming the problem publicly rather than managing it quietly — is more than most institutions manage. Wright deserves credit for that much.

The plan is the right one. NATO capability assessments don’t measure intentions — they measure what a country can field today, not what it plans to field by 2030. On that metric, Canada’s army is still a work in progress in May 2026. Wright knows it better than anyone.

The question he can’t answer is how much time he has left to finish the job.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.