Canada launches RFSA for the Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace

Project Update

Probably the quickest turnaround in newsletter history. I say this as if the date wasn't known by a bunch of people. Anywho, it's time for the main event of Canada's years-long escapade to build UxS capacity. It's not MINERVA, not a list fully, and not a challenge. It's a marketplace!

There has been so much hype about this concept that I'm shocked at how quiet things have been. A Canadian version of Brave1? A collected, pre-supplied network that can be rapidly ordered and onboarded by units outside the traditional procurement process? What's not to love?

Procurement has always been the knife in UxS's back when it comes to trying to build a Canadian industry that can produce drones at a scale able to sustain itself in peer conflict. We tried with GPUAS, the fun initiative of just copying the U.S. Blue List and giving commanders authority to procure drones of their own volition, using their own financial tools. That failed through lack of proper authorities, departmental struggles with folks like Transport Canada, and a general lack of drive to make it work.

We have MINERVA, which sets a framework and tries to create an ecosystem, but struggles with what it wants, and continues to follow the trap of chasing innovation and trying to recreate the wheel in an environment that fundamentally demands accessibility to viable products and capability out the gate. That isn't me trying to be mean to MINERVA; I try to be somewhat nice if I can, but it still falls into a lot of the same traps we see time and time again.

Challenges, ideas, contests, all produce cool concepts and interesting products, but lack the mechanisms to properly transition into CAF-wide capabilities across the board. All of which don't break out of the inherent system in place, whatever it is on any given day. Nor do they provide flexibility and commitment to industry that they will receive support and potential contract opportunities.

DDI aims to fix that by providing the fundamental procurement model for UxS across the CAF, covering both platforms and the ecosystem (cyber, C2, training, etc.) across a diverse spectrum of capabilities. We'll go into that in a few, but it is good to recognize that there is, at the least, ambition here.

Across the Western world, the Ukraine model of UxS procurement continues to inspire many to try and replicate its ecosystem to mixed results. We are far from the only one trying to domesticate the Brave1 model, and we would not be the first to be faced with the challenge of building that ecosystem outside a conflict environment where suppliers have an environment to drive investment, testing, innovation, etc.

There is something to be said about copying. I am not an advocate for replicating the lessons of Ukraine like a holy gospel brought to us by Saint Javelin herself; however, in this case, I am open to the model of Brave1, and am willing to hear it out for what it is, whatever we try to do. That's what we'll be jumping into, and I won't keep ranting for long. We'll have time for that after.

Instead, let's get into what we're actually looking for.

The Requirements

Let's get the fundamentals out of the way first, because I feel the need to bring it up with these things, especially since the RFSA ain't the most commonly talked about here. This is not an RFI, and it is not a project. It is a Request for Supply Arrangement, the results of which will be used to stand up the proposed Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace.

A supply arrangement, for those newer to the procurement weeds, is not a contract. Nobody is buying anything today. It is a standing framework of pre-qualified suppliers that the CAF, or anyone included like the CCG, can then rapidly solicit against for individual requirements, with each solicitation producing its own binding contract. Qualification as a supplier gets you in the room, but it guarantees you absolutely nothing beyond that.

The term is five years from issuance. The first qualification round closes on the fourteenth of August, with the first Supply Arrangements awarded "on or by" the tenth of September. That is a fairly short runway for an initiative that a lot in industry are still trying to figure out, and I suspect it is deliberate. Because there are next windows, the notice stays live, and so there is follow-up beyond this first round. New qualification rounds are scheduled for every three months until July 2027, then every six months until July 2031. As expected, this is a living roster of suppliers, not a one-shot. Existing qualified suppliers don't need to re-apply unless trying to branch into a new stream. As always now, a National Security Exception has been invoked as well. No longer much of an exception…

The initial phase is built around six use cases:

• Low-cost tactical ISR UAS

• Complex terrain UGVs

• Modular UxS explosive payload family

• Low-cost counter-UAS interceptors

• Maritime route survey and chokepoint confidence USV/UUV systems

• Deep precision strike capabilities.

Additional use cases can be bolted on over the life of the arrangement. I do want to be careful with the sixth one, though, and give a little bit of a caution tape to stuff. The RFSA lists deep precision strike as a use case, full stop. The backgrounder, however, goes out of its way to clarify it against the other use cases.

Deep precision strike is more complex, requires additional technical, operational, policy, legal, safety, and security work, and (in the DNDs own words) no acquisition decision is being announced at this stage. So read that one as a lane being formally opened, but not a capability being bought. The other five, though, are active.

Suppliers don't qualify against use cases. They qualify into streams. There are five, and a supplier can hold as many as they can pass.

Stream 1 covers UxS and C-UxS systems themselves: UAS, UGV, USV, UUV, hybrids, launch and recovery, payload-integrated systems, C-UxS sensors and effectors, one-way systems, threat-emulation and attritable systems, plus the repair, overhaul, maintenance, and field service representative support tied to them.

Stream 2 covers the connective stream: C2, communications, datalinks, mesh networks, SATCOM and BLOS, cellular integration, tactical networks, sensor fusion, data exploitation, EW, cyber, encryption, cloud and edge, and software-enabled operational systems.

Stream 3 is integration, interoperability, and engineering services: systems engineering, MOSA and open architecture, prototyping, modification, interface development, safety cases, technical documentation, configuration management.

Stream 4 is test, evaluation, and training: trials, demonstrations, test planning and instrumentation, operational analysis, courseware, operator and maintainer training, simulation, after-action reporting.

Stream 5 is innovation and experimentation, and it is deliberately left as the soft opening for SMEs looking at emerging technologies, low-TRL work, concept exploration, whitepapers, and Canadian firms that don't yet have defence sales history.

Now to get in. Evaluation is being done strictly using a pass/fail system. No points, no rankings, no weighted scores. The document is explicit that the criteria are intentionally kept broad to avoid excluding Canadian SMEs that have credible technical capability but haven't yet built out mature defence-enterprise processes.

All the real competition is deferred to the task-solicitation stage, where folks can layer on mandatory criteria, rated criteria, demonstrations, trials, cyber and supply-chain disclosures, and whatever basis of selection suits their requirement, whatever that may be.

The common mandatory criteria apply to everyone, and they are strict. To participate, a supplier must meet the definition of a Canadian supplier, with a permanent place of business in Canada conducting substantive operations. It further states that the intellectual property, proprietary technology, software, methodologies, or other core assets required to perform the work must be owned by, licensed to, or otherwise available for use by the supplier's Canadian operations.

Canadian operations must hold the legal right and operational capability to use, support, maintain, and service that IP for the full contract period; and that contract management, client support, and service delivery all run through the Canadian operations.

Now how this plays in practice isn't black and white despite how hard they try to layer the need for a supplier to be Canadian. A subsidiary of a foreign prime that flows everything back to its parent, with the IP and the engineers sitting abroad, obviously ain't gonna clear this. That's common sense.

At the same time, I'd caution against taking the maximalist approach. The phrase "or otherwise available for use by" is doing real work in that sentence, and a foreign OEM whose Canadian subsidiary holds a genuine licence, with genuine domestic support capability, has a path through. The gate is about where the substance sits, not where the ultimate parent is incorporated. Again, though, details will be in the execution.

The remaining common criteria are lighter: a signed non-disclosure agreement, and a written attestation that the supplier can support Government of Canada security screening, information handling, and controlled-information requirements when future solicitations demand them. There are no security requirements at the Supply Arrangement level itself. Those get attached by solicitation.

Stream-level criteria follow a single pattern for Streams 1 through 4. Suppliers must present one project reference from the past five years demonstrating relevant delivery, integration, support, or service to a FVEY or NATO partner, a federal government department, or a law enforcement agency, plus capability evidence appropriate to the stream, which can be as light as product data sheets, a capability matrix, an OEM authorization, or a support-model description. Fairly low requirements overall. This is about as low as an experience bar can be set while still being a bar, something fairly common here. Overtly open, low-bar requirements, built-in pathways for SMEs...

Stream 5 goes lower still. No past performance requirement at all. A supplier needs to be a Canadian legal entity capable of contracting, and must submit either a whitepaper describing the technology, the operational problem it addresses, its development status, its claimed TRL with supporting evidence, known limitations, and a proposed experimentation approach, or alternatively fill in the Technology Questionnaire annexed to the RFSA. That's it. If you are a Canadian startup with a credible concept and a TRL claim you can defend, the door is open to you.

That Technology Questionnaire is five pages maximum. It asks for TRL and MRL, production lead times, monthly or quarterly production capacity, and time to scale. It asks whether the system uses open interfaces and MOSA, whether Canada can integrate third-party payloads, radios, sensors, batteries, and software, whether interface control documents exist, whether the system can operate without vendor cloud services, and whether it functions in denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited-bandwidth environments.

It asks for the country of origin of final assembly and of major components, and whether any major components, firmware, software, cloud services, or manufacturing sources are associated with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or other jurisdictions of concern. It asks whether a bill of materials and software provenance can be provided under NDA, whether data can be stored and processed in Canada, and whether the system transmits data outside Canada in normal operation.

It asks whether the system is suitable for cold weather, remote, maritime, and Arctic conditions. It asks the vendor to self-assess the appropriate acquisition pathway as Buy, Build, or Partner, in exactly those words. And, in the line that stopped me, which these days is rare, it asks whether the system is currently in use in Ukraine or informed by operational lessons from Ukraine. I found that quite curious, but I digress for now.

For each requirement, Canada issues a solicitation to qualified suppliers in the applicable stream or streams, inviting a minimum of ten where ten exist, selected by a rotational, random, or capability-based approach. Where fewer than ten are qualified, everyone gets invited.

Solicitations can be posted for as little as five calendar days. They can cover anything from paper-based technology assessments and whitepapers through demonstrations, prototyping, experimentation, limited quantity buys, operational test and evaluation, training, integration work, sustainment, and full production scaling.

The system, in its hopeful end goal, wants to be able to carry a system from a five-page questionnaire response all the way to volume production without ever leaving the framework.

Thoughts

Ambitious might be the word to use here, perhaps aspirational. DDI is the third leg of what I would call the Canadian UxS ecosystem, benefited by a foundational doctrine in MINERVA, a rolling mix of institutions fostering R&D, testing, and integration like COVE, NEXUS, and DIANA, and now a proper procurement instrument to fill the gaps between the three.

We knew this was coming. It is also worth remembering what MINERVA scoped out, and that this isn't in itself a fix being applied strictly to MINERVA. C-UAS was explicitly excluded at the time, while DDI picks it up as a named use case.

DDI, in essence, tries to unify several disjointed offices, MINERVA, J-CUAS, etc., under a common procurement ecosystem to rapidly onboard capabilities versus either creating several separate systems in place, or being selective in what falls under specific banners. How do they execute? We will have to see. MINERVA is moving; J-CUAS should have something posted next week. Movement under this will happen fast.

I said at the time that the wider UGV RFI was an interim supplement because MINERVA wasn't moving fast enough, structured around standing offers for ongoing supply rather than a one-time buy. I can admit that I was overtly focused on MINERVA and wrong in my assumption there. I did not expect things to move this quickly.

That standing-offer, ongoing-supply, deliberately-open-roster model is something I have expected to take more center stage, same with things like limited tendering and pushing through contracts through strategic partnerships. The DIA has been very forthcoming that they have no qualms executing through alternative means that they see as supporting the mandate of the Defence Industrial Strategy, where Uncrewed and Autonomous Systems remain one of the ten sovereign capabilities.

I am hesitant to trust this. I trust it more than I did last week, but not enough yet to sing praises and throw the parade. After GPUAS and MINERVA, we constantly have the same cycle. Big initiative to fix UAS development and acquisition, lots of hype, only to drop the moment people realize that many still don't understand what they want and what role they expect UxS to play.

Those in the position of making decisions need to prove that they can fully open themselves up to what this is proposing. It will require a lot of personal change and a complete shift in mentality to what many have demonstrated now. It requires winners and losers, straight up, in an environment where “What role do UxS play?” and “How far do we go?” mean different things to almost anyone you ask, especially once we move into more complex stuff like deep precision strike concepts.

I am willing to give this a chance, and be proven wrong in my worries, but history is not graceful to folks here, and the mentalities, struggles, and failures are not lessons of the past but happening concurrently elsewhere. That will always make me skeptical.