Al Vigier
When the latest polling came out showing that 82 per cent of Canadians want defence dollars spent on domestically owned firms rather than foreign primes or their subsidiaries, the response was the usual hand-wringing about sovereignty and dependence. My take was that that was a good instinct, but the wrong target.
The debate everyone is having is about who builds the hardware. Who welds the airframe, who bolts together the vehicle, who manufactures the interceptor. It is a real fight, and it is also the one a country like Canada is least likely to win.
The platforms are already foreign. The supply chains are already foreign. The procurement machinery and the senior leadership are wired, by decades of habit and interoperability, to keep buying the same way. You do not stand up a sovereign airframe builder overnight, and pretend you can just hand everyone an excuse to keep doing what they were going to do anyway.
But hardware is not where sovereignty lives in a modern detection-to-decision system. It lives in the decision layer.
In a counter-UAS or ISR chain, the sensor detects, the effector engages, and in between sits the part that actually matters: the software that fuses multi-source detections into a single track, classifies it, and turns it into an engagement decision. That layer is the brain. The radar and the interceptor are the hands. And if the brain is foreign-owned and sits under foreign jurisdiction, the operator does not control the kill chain, no matter whose flag is painted on the launcher.
I build that layer for a living, so let me be plain about my interest before I go further… I run a Caseway in the decision-support space, and I want it disclosed up front. The argument stands on its own regardless of who is making it.
But here is what buyers keep getting wrong. They evaluate counter-UAS and ISR the way they evaluate a truck, which is by the spec sheet. Range, resolution, probability of kill. So the procurement conversation fixates on the hardware line items, because those are the ones that are easy to compare in a tender.
The decision layer gets treated as plumbing, bundled in with the platform, sourced from whoever supplied the sensor. And that is exactly how a country ends up with foreign-owned, foreign-governed software making the engagement call on a system it believes it owns.
The decision layer is also the part a smaller allied vendor can actually own. You cannot out-manufacture a defence prime on airframes. You can absolutely own the fusion and decision software, because software is the cheapest, fastest path to a genuine sovereign capability and the one with the lowest barrier to domestic ownership. This is the part of the stack where a mid-sized ally, or a Canadian SME, can hold the keys instead of renting them.
We have built our own model around exactly this. Our detection-to-decision partnership with Valtec splits the work so that the Canadian side primes the Canadian pursuits and the US side primes the US ones, with the decision layer kept sovereign on each side of the border rather than collapsed into a single foreign-owned stack.
Two allies, interoperable, neither one handing the other control of its own engagement decisions. That is not a slogan. It is an architecture choice, and it is the choice most procurement frameworks are not even set up to ask about.
Some will say this is just a software vendor talking about his book. Fair. But look at how the money is counted. Most allied procurement still measures domestic content in hardware: percentages of the platform built at home, industrial offsets, regional benefits. Under those rules, a foreign prime satisfies the local requirement with a subsidiary or a credit while the decision layer stays foreign-owned and foreign-controlled. The paperwork reads sovereign. The control does not. We are counting subsidiaries and calling it sovereignty.
I am proud to be in this industry, and I am not interested in protectionism for its own sake. Interoperability with allies is the whole point of a system like NORAD, and no serious person wants to wall it off. But interoperable is not the same as dependent. A network where every ally runs its decision layer on one nation’s stack is not interoperable, it is single-sourced, and single-sourced is brittle. We just watched how fast political friction can sever a dependency that everyone assumed was permanent.
So here is the task, and it is for the people who write the requirements. Treat the decision and data layer as a distinct sovereign capability class, separate from the platform, with its own ownership-and-control test and its own interoperability standard. Stop bundling the brain in with the hands. Stop evaluating it on a hardware spec sheet. And stop assuming that a system is sovereign because the launcher was assembled at home.
The country that owns its decision layer controls its own engagement decisions. The country that does not is operating someone else’s kill chain and calling it independence. For anyone buying counter-UAS or ISR right now, that is the line that actually decides whether you are sovereign, and almost nobody is putting it in the tender.
Al Vigier is the chief executive of Caseway, a sovereign Canadian automation/AI company based in the Vancouver area that builds decision-support software for counter-UAS and ISR. He served in the Canadian Army.
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