Quantum Sensors Are Conflict Prevention. Canada’s Defence Policy Should Say So.

Quantum 2030 and Foundations for Peace are two implementation strategies of Canada’s Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces (DND/CAF) that currently run along entirely separate tracks. Foundations for Peace is the implementation plan for the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, anchored in the country’s third national action plan. Quantum 2030 is the implementation plan that translates the 2021 Quantum Science & Technology (S&T) Strategy into specific technology missions. The quantum plan mentions gender once, to restate the existing departmental commitment to Gender-Based Analysis Plus,  while the WPS plan treats emerging technology almost exclusively as a source of harm. Neither document references the other.

The siloing is not an oversight worth shrugging off. The two policy areas share at least one substantive goal, conflict prevention, and at least one of the technologies named in Quantum 2030 maps directly onto it. Aligning implementation plans where strategic goals are shared can help DND/CAF to avoid duplicating effort and missing burden-sharing opportunities. This also allows continued commitment to the ideals of the WPS agenda in an era where an overtly feminist foreign policy seems to have less institutional buy-in.

What Each Plan Actually Says

The WPS agenda, launched in 2000 through UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and developed across a series of subsequent resolutions and initiatives, promotes gender equality as a means to enhance human security and reduce violent conflict. Canada’s third national action plan, Foundations for Peace, identifies six focus areas: building and sustaining peace; security, justice, and accountability; crisis response; sexual and gender-based violence; leadership and capabilities; and inclusion. Ten government departments, including DND/CAF, share the workplan and each has its own implementation plan. The DND/CAF plan acknowledges that the department has had mixed results delivering on previous WPS commitments and points to the recently created chief of professional conduct and culture position as part of the structural response.

In both Foundations for Peace and the DND/CAF WPS implementation plan, technology is mostly referenced as a threat. The term “technology-facilitated gender-based violence” appears repeatedly, along with cyberattacks, harassment in the information environment, doxxing, hacking, and stalking. What is missing is any discussion of how emerging technologies could advance the WPS agenda. UN Women’s 2015 global study on the implementation of Resolution 1325 actually took the broader view, reaffirming conflict prevention as the central purpose of WPS and noting that emerging technologies can collect data, build networks, and enable communication in ways that support the agenda. But the Canadian documents do not follow that lead.

The 2021 Quantum S&T Strategy and the 2023 Quantum 2030 present emerging technology as a neutral force that could become a threat in an adversary’s hands or an advantage in our hands. Quantum 2030 sets four missions for DND/CAF and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) to deliver over seven years: quantum-enhanced radar, quantum-enhanced LiDAR, quantum algorithms for defence and security problems, and quantum networking with theoretically unhackable protocols. The technologies promise advantages in precision, speed, and sensitivity that previous generations of military technology cannot match. The civilian applications of these “dual-use” technologies are also substantial. While the plan engages thoughtfully with how quantum will reshape DND/CAF operations and Canada’s alliance relationships, it does not engage with gender policy.

Where the Two Plans Converge

Two of the four Quantum 2030 missions, quantum-enhanced radar and quantum-enhanced LiDAR, are sensing technologies. They are designed to detect stealth aircraft, penetrate fog and smoke, support underwater imaging, and improve the security of defensive systems by remaining undetectable. The intended deployment site is the Canadian Arctic and the aerospace and maritime approaches to North America, in coordination with NORAD.

Andrea Charron and James Fergusson have argued that detection capability is what they call the first ingredient of denial credibility. A NORAD strategy of deterrence by denial depends on adversaries believing they will be seen, tracked, and intercepted before they reach their target. Quantum-enhanced sensing radically improves that capability. If deterrence by denial works, it prevents conflict.

Conflict prevention is precisely the goal that UN Women placed at the centre of the WPS agenda in 2015. The work of deploying quantum sensing in NORAD’s surveillance architecture is therefore not only a Quantum 2030 mission, and not only a NORAD modernization step. It is also a contribution to Canada’s WPS commitments. The two strategies share a single substantive objective that neither document acknowledges.

What Follows from Sharing Ground

This is the shortest bridge to cross between the two policy domains, and crossing it changes how each is built. For the WPS implementation plan, taking quantum sensing seriously means giving up the framing of emerging technology as a threat to women and gender-diverse people. Yes, the threats are real and the documentation of them matters. But they are not the whole story. Treating technology as exclusively dangerous discourages the kind of inquiry that UN Women has explicitly encouraged.

For the quantum strategy, the move is in the opposite direction. Quantum 2030 would benefit from naming conflict prevention through deterrence by denial as a goal aligned with WPS, rather than confining its gender treatment to a one-line GBA+ restatement. The dividend is more than rhetorical: a robust gender perspective on quantum

S&T identifies further use cases, and quantum domain expertise identifies further applications relevant to WPS objectives. Each silo holds knowledge from which the other can benefit.

The wider point is that identifying strategic alignments can help identify opportunities where government investment can make progress on goals shared between lines of effort. If WPS is really a whole-of-government commitment, then  overlaps with technical, defence, and innovation agendas should be proactively identified. The same logic also runs in reverse: defence and technology planners should examine how their work advances Canada’s broader policy objectives.

As we move toward 2030, the end date of both Foundations for Peace and Quantum 2030, the question is whether DND/CAF will treat the next iteration of each as an opportunity to identify shared missions, or whether it will produce another two documents that do not refer to one another. The cost of the second option is paid in duplicated effort and missed alliances inside the federal government. The cost of the first is one cross-team conversation.

Their recent article, “Sensing Common Ground? A Call for Collaboration Between the DND/CAF Quantum S&T Strategy and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” is published in International Journal and available here.