The Five Percent Reckoning
“If you’re going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.”
– Admiral Hyman Rickover
Admiral Hyman Rickover, known as the father of the American nuclear navy, understood something that is true of most large systems: they rarely reward risk-takers. They tend to value process over outcomes. They remember mistakes, not initiative. And unless political leaders demand otherwise, the system rarely changes.
In the 1950s, Rickover was handed a task no one had ever attempted: to design, build, and safely operate a fleet of nuclear-powered warships. He knew he couldn’t just engineer submarines and aircraft carriers. His team had to engineer the entire system around them. He created the training pipelines, the engineering standards, the supply chains, the doctrine, and the culture. His organization did the work, but he signed his name to all of it. No excuses. No ambiguity. No passing the blame.
We need that mindset in Canada right now.
Because our allies are no longer asking us to hit two percent of GDP on defence spending. This week, they told us the real number is five. And we don’t have a decade to get there.
I am at Canada’s defence industry conference, CANSEC. The tone has shifted. The question isn’t whether we should spend more. It’s whether we can deliver. Quickly. At scale. With purpose.
That isn’t just a budget challenge. It’s a generational test of government capability. Building a modern defence ecosystem isn’t like building a hockey arena. It’s not a single ribbon-cutting or a campaign promise. It’s a massive, sustained, deeply technical national undertaking. And if we get it wrong, there are no do-overs.
Successive governments have allowed defence to be treated like a procurement problem. We issue an RFP, argue over timelines, squeeze the bidder, and hope no one notices when it falls behind. Bureaucracies, by nature, follow the tone set by their political masters. When urgency is not demanded, delivery is not prioritized. That playbook will not work anymore. We are going to have to build something that lasts. Fast.
That means rethinking how we train and retain personnel in the Canadian Armed Forces. It means modernizing our entire procurement system to reward speed, operational need, and real value for money. It means investing not just in the best equipment, but in domestic production, supply chain resilience, and innovation.
It means taking responsibility. Not shared. Not diffused. Real responsibility. The kind Rickover demanded.
Rickover’s challenge was to take the most destructive force ever created and build a system where it could be used safely by human beings under pressure, in silence, beneath the ocean. The stakes were absolute. The margin for error was zero. His success wasn’t just a triumph of engineering. It was a triumph of culture. He made the system care.
That is the scale of what we’re facing. This isn’t about hitting a number on a spreadsheet. It’s about whether we can show up as a serious country in a dangerous world. Do we have the institutional muscle to move fast, make hard decisions, and deliver complex programs? Can we put mission ahead of politics, execution ahead of process?
Because our allies are watching. Washington. London. Warsaw. They are moving. Building. Spending. When they look to Canada, they aren’t really looking for platitudes. They are looking for capability. For seriousness. For delivery.
And yes, our adversaries are watching too.
The good news is we have a foundation. We have companies doing world-class work. We have skilled workers. We have military leaders who know what is at stake. We have communities like Halifax that are already national defence hubs. What we need now is accountability. starting at the top. Systems do not change themselves. They follow signals. If Ministers don’t demand performance, they will get process.
Left to its own devices, the system takes the path of least resistance. Nobody ever got fired for following process. Delay feels safer than risk. But five percent changes the math. We can either choose real accountability, led from the top, or fall back on our bad habits.
When I first moved to Ottawa, I was definitely an idealist. Now I think the more accurate label is frequently disappointed idealist. I wouldn’t call myself a cynic. Not yet. I still believe Canada can do great things when it wants to. But wanting to is not enough. Never was.