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Dispatched to carry troops and gear across the rugged terrain of the American southwest, the camels didn’t just survive, they thrived. The results of the experiment were “as favourable as the most sanguine could have hoped,” one officer wrote.

The United States Camel Corps were testament to thinking outside the box. In the century that followed, that drive to innovate built the world’s most impressive military. Canada, perhaps more than any other country, benefitted.

That benefit is now over. After eras of neglect and America dependency, Canada’s military needs a top-to-bottom upgrade. And quick.

Here’s the good news: On Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would be plowing nearly $9 billion of new money into the Canadian military, bringing us unexpectedly to meet NATO’s two per cent spending target, five years ahead of even Carney’s campaign promise.

If Carney can get this right — a huge if — this could reverse the decline of the Canadian military in a big way.

Speaking in ɫɫ�� on Monday, the prime minister underscored the extent of our need: “Only one of our four submarines is seaworthy. Less than half our maritime fleet and land vehicles are operational. More broadly, we’re too reliant on the United States.”

This new cash is being put toward a few key areas: boosting salaries for Canadian Armed Forces personnel, sending more military kit to Ukraine, and funding new technology, particularly around cyber and for use in the Arctic.

Carney is “unambiguously clear in what he wants to achieve, and wants to use the industrial base to do it,” Christyn Cianfarani, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, told me. That’s provoking real, honest optimism on a file where it’s often been in short supply.

But if you’re looking for any big-ticket purchases in Monday’s announcement, you won’t find them. Only about seven per cent of this new money to actually buy new equipment.

I asked Cianfarani if she’s worried about the mismatch between capital and operational spending? I got a blunt answer: “Yes.” The Canadian military knows the risk here, too. A senior defence official, in a background briefing, told me that this new funding is about getting the military to a state of readiness — including our ability to buy things properly. In the coming years, focus will turn toward recapitalizing the military. Figuring out how to do all of this during tough economic times, Cianfarani says, “will be an absolute balancing act.” If it works, it will be huge.

For starters, Canada’s procurement process is broken, particularly for military hardware. Our system operates on the myth that if something takes a long time, it must be good. So we spend years planning, years drawing up procurement plans, years holding competitions, and decades waiting for the kit to arrive, almost always past deadline and over budget.

Roman Shimonov, founder of Roshel, which makes smart armoured vehicles, says that thinking is exactly backwards: “By the time the procurement happens, it is already too late because it’s outdated.”

To fix this glacial system, Carney is wisely moving military procurement back under the Department of National Defence. He even devoted a whole day on the campaign trail to talk about fixing military procurement, a wonky process announcement that he personally insisted on. Again, good signs.

But Canada won’t fix its military by shuffling around bureaucratic responsibility. This new procurement process needs to be strategic and efficient. That means thinking long-term, not just buying things one-at-a-time.

Carney has underlined the need for this longitudinal thinking, saying he wants to connect this defence industrial base to the rest of the Canadian economy — building equipment “using Canadian steel, Canadian aluminum, Canadian critical minerals.”

This is no small thing. Canada has long supplied the raw material for U.S. manufacturing, including the U.S. military, which produces things that we turn around and buy. That has come at the expense of our ability to refine those materials, steel in particular. 

The tariff war is already prompting changes. Shimonov is producing one armoured vehicle with zero U.S. content, using steel frames made in Mexico, and is hoping to start buying Canadian-made military-grade steel in the near future.

Domestic production is great, but we can’t make everything here. Carney is already looking to integrate Canada into the European Union’s defence industrial base, but we also need to look further afield — we need to find our own camels. Ukraine is an obvious choice: Their war of survival has pushed them to innovate and iterate solutions, beyond even what the Pentagon has developed. We need to go all-in on that fight.

Shimonov already has: His company has sent more than 1,800 armoured vehicles to Kyiv, mostly purchased and donated by NATO countries other than Canada. He has recently opened his first factory in Ukraine.

Or consider Taiwan. They have the world’s most advanced semiconductor industry, but are in desperate need of experience in producing military hardware as they face a possible invasion from neighbouring China. Or South Korea. Seoul has been , offering to locate some of the maintenance in Canada and transfer some of the on-board technology to our navy. That could be the nucleus of a future Canadian submarine program, and the start of a beautiful friendship.

If Canada wants more of those partnerships, and wants Canadian companies to be in a similar position, Ottawa needs to be a pitchman for Canadian industry. For years, the Liberal government has been squeamish about advertising Canada’s defence industry. “There isn’t a nation that hasn’t made a visit to Canada to try and sell their submarines,” Cianfarani says. “So why are we so ashamed at doing the same?”

But there’s a core problem: We need things to sell. To develop those things, we need to take some inspiration from the U.S. Camel Corps and find a way to try lots of unconventional strategies, and quickly. We need to research, fund, and buy technology in months, not years, and try it out. Rather than opting for too-big-to-fail programs, we need a “fail fast, fail often” approach, Cianfarani says.

All of this is in service of standing on our two feet. But while decoupling from America can’t come quick enough, that doesn’t mean we should be foolish.

Take the F-35 fighter jet. Some, pointing to delays and cost overruns, want us to cancel the deal. (Again.) That would be a mistake.

Ottawa is in the midst of reviewing the procurement but, I learned on background, they are not looking to cancel the order. We are already on the hook for 16 planes, and we will likely need about two dozen in order to manage both our territorial defence and fulfil our international obligations. 

But the Carney government is looking to extract an interesting concession from manufacturer Lockheed Martin. To date, the only F-35 depots — where the planes are maintained and upgraded — in the world are in the United States and Israel. Ottawa wants one of those depots in Canada. (Last year, then-Minister Bill Blair began exploring the possibility of locating such a depot in Quebec.)

The Canadian pitch is shrewd. It would not only help us, but also our other NATO allies who have already bought the jets and who are worried that America may withhold those services as a bargaining chip.

Even still, I’m told, it’s unlikely we will buy the full complement of 88 planes we signed up for. Instead, Canada is hoping to join the early stages of the United Kingdom’s sixth-generation strike fighter program. That’s smart.

Canada has made the right noises before, but it has always gone off the rails. The big test for Carney is whether he can follow through.

After all, it is persistence that matters. The U.S. Camel Corps ultimately failed. Its biggest booster, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, went on to become President of the Confederate States. By the time the Civil War was over, nobody knew how to manage the foreign animals. “It is to be regretted,” the head of the Bureau of Animal Industry wrote decades later, “that the trial of the camel in the Western world was not carried to conclusive results.”