Building Citizen Resilience: Preparing Canadians for an Age of Grey-Zone Conflict
Issue 4 | Published October 2025 | Juliana Haras, Department of National Defence
Embedded in the proliferation of threats to national security is a kernel of opportunity. A confluence of events in recent years and months has not only heightened the urgency of societal resilience-building, but generated the conditions for it. This paper makes the case for a more proactive, systematic approach to building Canadians’ capacity to recognise and resist the interconnected threats that hostile states pose in the grey zone between traditional conceptions of war and peace. It argues for federal leadership in raising the level of ambition of efforts to inoculate young Canadians against grey-zone threats, challenging assumptions about the realm of the possible in building citizen resilience. The scope of the analysis and recommendations extends beyond defence against weaponised information, to capture the array of hostile attempts at influence, subversion, and coercion that seek to undermine the capability and willingness of open societies to defend themselves.
Canada’s Long-Term Strategic Situation
Issue 3 | Published July 2025 | Dr, John Keess
In March 1962, Dr. R.J. Sutherland, a little-known defence scientist and policy advisor from the Defence Research Board (DRB), gave a closed-door talk at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA). Sutherland had been recruited by CIIA President John Holmes to provide members with “an appreciation of how important Canada may be from a military point of view in the nuclear age,” - a limited, if important topic in the rapidly-changing conditions of the early 1960s. The speaker found the question a bit limiting, but promised not to “fight the problem,” even if he might “interpret the topic a little.” Over the next hour, Sutherland went much further than a little interpretation and drew on his decades of study in history, technology, politics, and economics to imagine some possible scenarios for Canada’s world position in the year 2000.
Deterrence Through Whole-of-Society Resilience – Meeting the Challenge of Hybrid Threats in the Grey Zone
Issue 2 | Published July 2025 | Peter Gizewski, Michael A. Rostek
Developments in the international system underline the fact that the world remains unpredictable, dangerous and complex. Adding to such complexity is the conduct of hybrid activities in the grey zone. Existing just below the threshold of armed conflict, hybrid activities involve coordinated application of diplomatic, informational, cyber, military and economic instruments to achieve strategic or operational objectives. They pose significant challenges confounding binary conceptions of peace and war, the use of military and non-military means, and conventional and irregular approaches to conflict. Whole-of society approaches to resilience are advanced for strengthening deterrence as well as societal defence against hybrid threats.
The Populist Disruption: Trump and Contemporary American Civil-Military Relations
Issue 1 | Published April 2025 | Philip T. Gebert
President Donald J. Trump’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021 disrupted the United States’ (U.S.) civil-military relations (CMR) which developed following the Second World War. The Trump administration increasingly applied and abused subjective control of the military, undermining its traditionally non-partisan role and attempted to transform it into a praetorian guard loyal to the President rather than the Constitution or the state. Despite this violation of traditional CMR, the President’s supporters – particularly those within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, who profess a deep reverence of the American military – endorsed his manipulation of the institution for personal and political gain. This effort culminated in the President’s botched self-coup following his defeat in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, during which the military refused to assist in his unlawful attempt to maintain power. The election of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. ended this disruption and restored CMR to the pre-Trump status quo, albeit temporarily.