Over the past year, we at HESA towers have been thinking about how post-secondary institutions fit into Canada’s national defence, security, and sovereignty priorities, and the implications for research and skills/training. We’ve also been looking at how other countries have structured their defence R&D ecosystems and sharing some of the lessons those systems can teach Canadian institutions. We’re building on that work this year – stay tuned for an announcement on that at the end of this blog.
For the last eighteen months or so, the Government of Canada has been trying to understand what it means to have a more independent defence posture – with respect to technology and procurement in particular – now that our closest NATO/NORAD apparently can’t be trusted to act as an ally anymore. And in turn, the country’s post-secondary institutions have been trying to work out where Government thinking on this subject is headed so that they can position their institutions as partners for whatever R&D actually ends up coming out of this re-think.
This is all completely understandable. The mistake, though, is to think that this is some kind of one-off sprint and that the whole shape of defence R&D is going to be decided in the next eighteen months. It’s not. Remember what Prime Minister Carney said; this is a rupture, not a transition. It’s going to take years – maybe decades – for all of this to play out. And, so, what matters in the first 3-5 years of this process is almost certainly not what will matter over a 10- or 20-year period. This could still move in some very unpredictable ways.
In this vein, it’s worth taking a look at how South Korea has dealt with the issue of military R&D over the past few decades. For the first few decades after the Korean War, the country was essentially 100% reliant on US-made and technology; any materiel it made for itself was based on licensing agreements with US firms. Gradually, from the 1990s onwards, it began co-producing materiel with foreign firms, and by the 2010s it had become a major exporter of military equipment, above all to NATO countries, as well as supplying much of its own needs.
How did it get there? Through a hell of a lot of R&D spending, managed mainly through the Agency for Defence Development (ADD) and then later through the Defence Acquisition Program Administration (a good primer on DAPA is here from Tae Yeon Eom of the Asia-Pacific Foundation). But it’s not just the spending: it’s about the degree of coordination between partners. DAPA’s view on innovation is that it’s mostly about getting the right players – in this case researchers and manufacturers – in a room together and making them go. That’s why you often see stories in the Korean press about universities signing MOUs with dozens of firms at one go (see here for such a tie-up at Jeonbuk University) or alternately, one company signing MOUs with dozens of universities at one go (here’s one from Hanwha Aerospace). It’s very much like the philosophy of the Finnish innovation fund Tekes (which was briefly seen as a model for innovation in Canada), only more dirigiste.
Another interesting thing about the Korean model is that DAPA holds the functions of being simultaneously the military’s procurement wing and its R&D wing. Generally speaking, countries don’t mix these two functions – to quote Eom here: “Procurement buys what exists; R&D determines what will exist a decade hence”. Even within DAPA itself, there are legally two separate governing logics when it comes to executing these two tasks. But the benefit of housing these two in the same organization is that – in Korea’s case at least – avoids the “Valley of Death” problem. There’s less chance that procurement will turn its nose up at new products when they arrive after years of R&D because in this instance procurement has been following the development of these new products for years and can pipe up if they think the project is going off track.
A final piece of note about Korea is how DAPA is how it treats intellectual property. As a procurement agent, if a foreign company wins a procurement bid, one of the stipulations is that it has to either transfer some technology to Korean partners or license certain parts of the production to Korean manufacturers. If it were just a procurement agency, this wouldn’t work very well – but because DAPA is responsible for both procurement and R&D it can be very strategic about the kinds of technology to which it seeks access. Also, on the production end of things, DAPA and its various agencies (including ADD) have the ability to charge fees to Korean companies who use government-funded R&D to create new weapons system – and by law those agencies need to feed that money back into R&D (including to universities). The government often chooses to waive these fees so it’s not a perfect feedback loop, but the idea that exports success can fund university research makes for some nice alignment.
Anyways, the point of all this isn’t to say that Korean military R&D system is perfect and we should all adopt its forms and methods. But there are three important takeaways from the Korean story.
- Getting good at defence R&D and procurement – and weaning yourself off foreign supply chains – isn’t something that takes years. It takes decades. Decades of patient, thoughtful, engaged commitment and investment.
- It’s right and proper to separate procurement and R&D. But there are still ways to link the two than can make for a whole lot less waste in the R&D process.
- Higher education institutions can and should be part of a successful defence R&D initiative. But it doesn’t really work unless they also have deep partnerships with a wide swath of manufacturers industry partners as well.
Let’s just say that none of these three takeaways have really been absorbed here yet. The Liberals aren’t patient at anything with respect to innovation and research (anyone remember Superclusters?), our links between R&D and procurement are patchy at best, and Korean-style links between PSE institutions and manufacturers are – for a variety of reasons – pretty thin on the ground.
But this, folks, is where universities and colleges have an opportunity to play an important role in developing policy. The Government of Canada – and in particular the bits of it related to defence – have almost no experience in this area because we’ve never in living memory seen the need to prioritize domestic defence R&D capacity (the Avro Arrow was 67 years ago). It’s as new to them as it is to the rest of us.
And so, while everyone in Ottawa is chasing their tails figuring out how to make the next 3-5 years work, why doesn’t the higher ed sector start thinking about what the next 30-50 might look like? Why not put some heads together to think through how we might be as successful as Korea has been? And, at the same time, ensure that i) an appropriate balance between basic and applied research is struck in Canadian defence spending, and ii) we work out how the kinds of deep collaborations between higher education and industry that make Korea so successful could work here.
Bottom line: everyone has to play the short game. But the smart move is to simultaneously be designing the long game, too. Canadian universities, colleges, and polytechnics could help the whole country by starting down this path as well.
Over the next nine months, Higher Education Strategy Associates will be convening our inaugural Defence Ready Strategic Leadership Cohort. It’s a syndicated project in which participating institutions (all welcome!) can learn more about the defence ecosystem, have critical conversations, identify and break down barriers to defence readiness, and learn from experts – and one another – to accelerate change and build long-term strategy. We’ll be providing institutions with thematic reports that synthesize current research, Canadian and international case studies, and insights from leaders across academia, industry, and government. All this is to be accompanied by monthly virtual meetings with experts from Canada and abroad, facilitate by Alex Petit-Thorne and Alex Usher. Ultimately, the focus is to get institutions building towards the long game.
Interested? Read more here and give us a shout at apetitthorne@higheredstrategy.com. We’d love to have you on board for the ride.
