Canada’s tri-theater strategy to deny, deter and defend in the North

It is not a mere irritant that Russia is shadowing Europe’s undersea cables and that China’s gray-zone fishing flotillas are pushing at the limits in the East China Sea. These are calculated attempts to gain a strategic advantage through hybrid warfare. 

For the U.S., this means defending the undersea commons and the infrastructure laid across it, deterring hybrid probes without endless escalation, balancing finite naval and joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance resources between Europe and the Indo-Pacific and sharing burdens with allies. 

For Canada, the key question is what must be done in the Northern Approaches — the North Pacific, Arctic and North Atlantic — to monitor, harden and hold contested waters and air–sea seams daily, not just during crises. Ottawa’s answer is overlapping sensors that compress decision space, continuous presence that closes gaps, undersea shadows that raise adversary risk and seabed infrastructure that can’t be left in the dark. 

The concept is simple: Make every probe costly, every approach dangerous and every act of sabotage perilous long before it matures. Make friction accumulate to the point that misbehavior becomes self-defeating.

In practice, this starts with early warning. Canada has funded North American Aerospace Defense Command modernization and selected northern over-the-horizon radar sites, while space-based maritime surveillance already feeds Marine Security Operations Centers. Those feeds are being fused with upgraded coastal high-frequency radars and automatic identification system networks, and joint Canadian Air Force and Navy nodes are turning collections into machine-assisted cueing for aircraft and ships. 

The near-term task is clear: Finish the over-the-horizon radar build-out, deepen commercial satellite tasking and standardize data pipelines with U.S. and NATO partners.

The patrol architecture is being rebuilt to capitalize on the pushed-out warnings. The Royal Canadian Navy’s Harry DeWolf-class Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships now sustain regular presence from the Labrador Sea to the Bering. P-8A Poseidon maritime-patrol aircraft are being contracted to restore broad-area anti-submarine warfare intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance as CP-140 aircrafts wind down. 

On shore, forward operating locations, austere logistics points and improved northern runways are being readied so that aircraft, drones and ships can turn that picture into patrols.

Uncrewed systems and a serious seabed enterprise deepen persistence. The navy has deployed and tested autonomous underwater systems, moving from trials toward multi-site remote mine-hunting and disposal. Canada is also mapping priority cable and pipeline segments and working with industry to harden landing sites and sharpen anomaly detection.

Where public documentation is thin, the direction of travel is unmistakable: Scale persistent inspection at chokepoints and feed seabed telemetry into the national operating picture to deny adversaries the darkness they count on.

The air domain is getting similar treatment. The MQ-9B SkyGuardian program will knit satellite and over-the-horizon radar cueing to long-endurance patrols from Greenwood and Comox. At sea, Ottawa has pursued rotary-wing drone options for small decks; trials of the V-200 Skeldar concept for deploying air-launched sensors designed to relay underwater sounds point to a practical way to extend the ears of Arctic and offshore patrol ships and future surface combatants.

Ice access is being locked in for the long haul. The Canadian Coast Guard has two large polar icebreakers under contract at Seaspan and at Davie, with delivery targeted for the early 2030s. These programs extend season and reach for Coast Guard and Navy support, turning episodic Arctic access into routine presence.

Undersea denial is being woven into this fabric. Ottawa has framed the conventional-submarine replacement around long-legged, cold-water boats with endurance, quieting and combat-system commonality with close allies. These submarines will hand off contacts to air and surface units, loiter undetected at chokepoints and complicate attempts to tamper with seabed infrastructure. The job is daily friction, not rushed responses to episodic crises.

The objective is predictable patrol boxes in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, predictable listening arcs and cable-surveillance routes in the Arctic and tightly integrated coverage along the Aleutians in close coordination with U.S. and Japanese forces. Some of this is already occurring; the remainder must be institutionalized as a standing Northern Approaches tasking order, published or not, so that presence can be scheduled, measured and resourced year-round.

These developments add up to a quiet but decisive departure from Canada’s old middle-power routine. The storyline is being reworked from “helpful-fixer” and “punching above our weight” to regional stewardship measured by quiet cables, covered seams and fewer U.S. sorties diverted north. The integrated build is designed to lock these rhythms into doctrine, budgets and allied tasking so that reliability outlasts any cabinet shuffle.

From Washington’s point of view, the success of Canada’s new strategy will be defined by cables and seams, but also by secure approaches and unlocked bandwidth. And the truest test will be results in and around the Northern Approaches. 

If in five years patrol aircraft fly on Canadian orders over cues from sea and shore, the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom and Aleutian gaps are reliably covered and seabed cables are mapped, monitored and left alone, the strategy will be working and there will be no dramatic headlines. And a no-headlines future is exactly what Washington wants from its Canadian ally.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.