Innovations

Digital Transformation is not about transforming our current digital things into better digital things. It is about changing our entire relationship with technology, bringing the CA from an analog organization with legacy industrial-era force structures, tools, processes, governance models and culture, to a true, data-driven, innovative organization that maximally leverages the military potential of digital solutions to influence the battle in our favour — both in the office and in the field. The CA Digital Transformation aims to align our current state with our needed state by helping to guide CA members of all ranks through this transformation. By promoting leadership and empowerment of tech-savvy CA members, the CA Digital Transformation is only lays the groundwork of this staff-lead transformation.

To implement those new concepts the creativity of our members is being empowered, allowing their respective units to experiment with various technologies with the intent of providing the CA with new and innovative systems and processes. Innovations in technology are accelerating and converging to create novel capabilities that we can only leverage by transforming our relationship with this technology into something more symbiotic that will better suit modern conflicts. Through collaborations with volunteer industry partners as well as creativity and leadership demonstrated by our members at all level, the CA will be able to reinvent itself in way that will better fit the modern world. The collaborative effort on this transformation is further proof that CA members can be positive change makers, independently of their ranks and experience.

2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (2 CMBG) has challenged the status quo and embraced the Canadian Army digital transformation with their Decentralized Command Post (CP) concept.

Learn more by reading about our conversation with Major Nicolas Gonthier.

Survivability of CPs is increasingly threatened by modern technology and tactics; becoming a major vulnerability facing western armed forces. For the first time, a team has implemented a decentralized Brigade CP, making it better suited to the hard realities of the modern battle space. Armed with only a commander’s intent to becoming more disperse and resilient, and a desire to be more creative and innovative, 2 CMBG Headquarters and & Signal Squadron developed a new concept of operation to make the Brigade CP more survivable, digitized, and agile.

With ideas welcomed and encouraged across all ranks and trades, the team designed a new decentralized, modular, and scalable concept of operation. The troops worked collaboratively with Industry volunteers and placed no limits on ideas. In under 45 days from ideation to prototype, the results were beyond expectation. A proof of concept was delivered which allowed a rapidly deployable and mobile CP which can be set up in under 20 minutes. This innovative approach will be tested and refined, and doctrine written as part of other exercises with the intention of operationalizing the new approach by Summer 2023. Projects like this prove that when we align priorities, resources, expertise, and remove artificial barriers, modernization can happen and it can happen quick!