Shaping defence procurement

 In a few short weeks, everything Canada had held as true about our national defence changed. Those who believe that Trump’s presence in the White House is time-limited, and that the relationship will go back to the way it was when he’s gone, are mistaken: the damage is done, and it will take at least a generation to rebuild trust between Canada and the United States. 

With its 80-year alliance with the United States on a precipice, Canada needs to reinvent its defence industrial base, in cooperation with new partners. This undertaking will involve multiple phases: near term priorities will be focused on strategic acquisitions to fill capability gaps with minimal focus on domestic industrial benefits; medium term will focus on growing (focused) domestic industrial capacity with non-US partners; and ultimately Canada will want to domesticate significant capacity on both production and ILS.  

To this end, Prime MInister Mark Carney has appointed Steve Fuhr as the brand new Secretary of State for Defence Procurement. Secretary Fuhr's role will be to build out a whole new way for Canada to engage with defence and security providers both at home and around hte world to meet the country's needs both today and tomorrow. 

This will not simply mean copying and pasting the current structures spread across multiple departments into one building - far from it. Secretary Fuhr will need to build a system that is able to improvise, risk, adapt and sometimes fail in cooperation with our reliable allies. He will be looking for a system that recognizes what Canada can do at home and what it cannot. 

Get in early; shape the thinking behind the procurement; make your value-proposition clearly understood to senior decision-makers. 

For the foreseeable future, Canada will not be doing procurement in the traditional way. And that is very good news because that system was already deeply flawed and broken. 

As part of building a new system, Secretary Fuhr will be looking to other countries for both their advice and experiences in defence procurement. Canada needs to build new relationships with new partners around the globe to rebuild a defence industrial base that has been neglected in favour of simply buying American kit. 

But how does Canada make those change? Who are, in fact, reliable partners?  

We can help you shape the government's answer to those questions.

We believe that those interested in Canadian defence  procurement are about to need twice the sex with half the foreplay. 

In other words, the traditional approach just isn't going to cut it. If you want to sell kit into Canada in the short- and medium- term, you are going to have to shape the thinkinging of senior decision-makers -  political, civilian and uniformed - far before any decision to procure is made. You will need to be able to sell a capability, a team and an industrial approach far before you sell a piece of kit. 

We are building out the team to help you do that. 

Our focus will not be on answering RFPs but rather on shaping the requirements that are adopted long before and RFP is drafted. 

We will map out the "knights of no", they're likely objections and how to defeat them. 

We will help you find the industrial partners in Canada who can quickly accept technology transfer and become long-term partners in country. 

And we will help you work with your own government to bring a larger value proposition to Canada. 

It's a new world - isn't it time to do things differently?