Guardrails can do many things for businesses, from enforcing best practices to preventing harm. They are broadly control and compliance measures that are packaged in various ways such as policies, constraints, risk thresholds, behavioural standards and practices.
A quick search confirms the term “guardrail” has now been hijacked by AI. But in articles I have written regarding weapon systems platform acquisition projects, I have largely referred to them from a “harm prevention to desired outcomes” perspective. So it is with this piece.
It is easy to argue that the overuse of such guardrails has created the bureaucratic labyrinth of constraints typical of our system for complex acquisitions, which routinely delivers outcomes that are late to need. It is in part because of such overuse that the Defence Investment Agency (DIA) was created in October 2025.
In addition to implementing the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS), the DIA is moving towards greater accountability with significant additional authorities that were not delegated by the Treasury Board for risky and expensive acquisition projects in the past.
Consider the quote attributed to Thomas Murner in 1512: “Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.” The expression “emphasizes the importance of being mindful in decision-making processes, ensuring that the valuable elements are preserved while addressing unwanted aspects.”
Without a doubt, there is a lot of unwanted dirty bathwater in the acquisition system, as identified in the June 2024 report by the Standing Committee on National Defence, A Time for Change: Reforming Defence Procurement in Canada. At a meeting of the Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on 10 February 2026, Secretary of State for Military Procurement Stephen Fuhr indicated that the intent was to address the findings of the report.
The babies I am referring to are the essential guardrails that must be preserved as acquisition processes are reformed and created for the DIS. I offer this not because I support the flawed complex acquisition system of the past, but because I desperately want the DIA to succeed.
From experience, I offer two general guidelines:
- In terms of policy and process reform, what exists was built over decades to avoid risk, usually for good reason. Merely eliminating policies and process steps is not recommended without fully appreciating the consequences, a critical analysis that rarely happens when streamlining in haste. A much better approach is “leaning”: reducing policies and processes to five categories: the purpose of each and the related context; the minimum statement of what action is mandatory and why (“thou shall”); the authority that can offer waivers; what should be avoided (“thou should not”); and additional non-mandatory considerations that could require further action to fit context.
- People introduce risks to success based on their personalities, worldviews and personal biases. Guardrails should include five practices: setting and managing expectations; sustainable and comprehensive collaboration through joint working (and the related use of “swarming” to ensure broad understanding and accelerate completion); stakeholder management techniques such as prioritization and polarization management; service level agreements; and the application of RACI to clearly define responsibilities.
Reform of the Acquisition System
The acquisition system faces two essential questions: how should what exists be changed, and what new elements should be added to avoid harm.
Changes to What We Have: The general guidelines above provide the key elements of reform guardrails to ensure that process re-engineering is enabled appropriately. Two reform process guardrails follow: appropriate risk identification and treatment, accompanied by tracking into implementation, is essential to allow adaptation in the early stages; and every suggested change should be accepted unless there is a compelling reason not to do so.
Adding What is New and Promising: This is a tougher question. When adding new elements to improve the existing acquisition system or to create policies and processes around DIS implementation, care must be taken not to recreate a paralyzing bureaucracy. This requires incremental implementation through trial and error.
Novel techniques are continuously emerging, so care must be taken to introduce guardrails into the innovation process as well. For the DIA, such continuous improvement is a vital enabler to maximizing efficiency, but must not permanently sacrifice operational effectiveness.
Finally, the DIA should add emerging techniques in complex project management to the acquisition system for major platforms for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). This is a growing suite of practices now embraced by the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia and beyond.
Execution of Acquisition Projects
Launching Projects: Essential guardrails when launching complex projects relate to the execution team: strength in all required capabilities, more than adequate capacity, and early team establishment.
Capable execution teams with “capacity plus” have exhibited a direct relationship to the success of complex projects. Capabilities include experienced leadership, sector-specific knowledge (e.g. warship design and shipbuilding) and specialty knowledge (e.g. advanced risk management, linear optimization in decision-making, AI). Capacity must go beyond adequate to address surge requirements through access to surplus resources (e.g. through contracting) across all execution sections.
Early establishment of the full execution team ensures that the general guardrails mentioned earlier are being applied as operational requirements are being developed.
Governance: Guardrails beyond those for general governance are needed around knowledge of the project’s sector-specific technologies and practices. Other guardrails enabling timely decisions include responsiveness to the execution team and investing the time needed to reach decisions. Periodic audits by an independent body offer a guardrail of great value.
Approvals: Similar to the capabilities of the project execution teams, sector-specific and current ground truth knowledge of the project in question, and experience in the execution of complex projects, are key guardrails for those with approval authority, along with timeliness.
Setting Operational and Technical Requirements with Industry Partners: The essential first guardrail here must be acceptance of the recommended requirements by the service commanders of the CAF. Additional guardrails include a focus on the minimum viable product based on a mix of essential high level mandatory requirements (HLMRs) and lower level mandatory requirements (LLMRs), plus a prioritized set of desirable supporting enablers that would collectively be “good enough.”
HLMRs and LLMRs must be kept to a smaller number based on critiques by industry during large tent engagement, to provide industry with maximum implementation options.
In terms of prioritization of desirable requirements, this requires a guardrail provided by the project execution team based on a return-on-investment type of analysis, where the trade-offs are availability (preferably in Canada) and simplicity, measured against the effects achieved. Availability and simplicity are essential as we shift from peacetime to a wartime footing with the real prospects of attrition when deterrence fails. Quantity must therefore be considered as having an important quality in fleet mixes, and simplicity becomes important for both production at scale and maintenance support.
Sourcing Industry Suppliers: This subject is broad and addressed by the DIS in significant detail, focused on greater sovereign industrial capabilities in ten areas. The primary procurement strategy is based on “build (in Canada), partner (with other nations) and buy (from foreign suppliers when the other two are not possible).” Each of these already has guardrails established over decades, now under the control of Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC). The one addition of value is artificial intelligence, a capability where great progress has already been made in commercial sourcing and analysis.
As for many elements that are new to Canada in the DIS, the details surrounding implementation are not yet available to support a full guardrail discussion here, but they will be necessary. In the meantime, an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Trouble With State Capitalism” discusses the dangers of state interventions and some potentially applicable guardrails for DIS implementation.
Contract Implementation: An essential guardrail relates to risk management. Complexity demands much more risk sharing than the normal attribution “to the party that can best control it.” Given the heightened level of uncertainty in both design and construction complexity, and from unpredictable emerging risks, many concerns cannot be controlled by any one party. This leads to two additional guardrails: all risks are ultimately owned by the customer; and contract flexibility must enable ongoing adaptation to emerging risks. A recent report by the World Commerce and Contracting Association offers further evidence of the emerging trends in contracting.
Delivery: Test and trials for reliability are a longstanding guardrail that are too often omitted or inappropriately hastened to make delivery dates, thus putting effectiveness in jeopardy.
Concluding Thoughts
The DIA faces a huge workload ahead and few resources in place to tackle acquisition reform, implement the DIS and guide the execution of many complex weapon system acquisition projects that are critical to the future of the CAF.
As with all new opportunities, the announcements of the DIA and DIS were met with excitement and an expectation of urgency that will only grow.
All large ships employ guardrails for safety in storms, until the bucking and yawing require the upper deck to be off limits. So too with complex acquisition projects, except that clearing the upper deck does not work. It is tantamount to failure.
I sincerely hope that all involved in government and industry will work to ensure they have appropriate guardrails in place as enormous sums of money come under contract. Unless the unavoidable missteps are minor, the taxpayers may rebel, to the detriment of the CAF and its members.