Members of the 1st Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery stand near a M777 Howitzer as Canadian Armed Forces deploy to 'Operation Nanook-Nunalivut,' a yearly series of drills designed to highlight the military’s ability to defend the Canadian Arctic, in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, on Feb. 19.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
The Canadian Army’s planned reorganization will include a massive surge in combat capabilities as part of a new division that is centred on armoured vehicles, mobile artillery and drone warfare, according to a leaked internal document.
An organization chart for the new division was recently posted to social media. The Canadian Forces later confirmed it is authentic. The army said the chart was taken from a presentation slide related to its modernization plan, but declined to say whether the structure outlined in the graphic is final.
The army announced its modernization plan last year as part of a long-term effort by the Canadian Forces to expand its ranks and prepare for the possibility of major conflict.
That work has taken on a new urgency in the past year in light of President Donald Trump’s trade war and rhetoric toward Canada, which has prompted the government to promise to make this country less reliant on the United States. Canada is now ramping up its spending on military staffing and equipment to meet higher defence investment targets agreed to last year by member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
While the army has shared the broad outlines of its modernization program, the chart offers new details about the equipment, command structure and capabilities that will fall under a new 1st Division, also to be known as the Manoeuvre Division, which is set to be based in Edmonton. It is one of three divisions that will make up the restructured army, alongside home defence and infrastructure support.
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Today, the Canadian Army is organized into four regional divisions headquartered in Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and Halifax. This structure has been designed primarily for ease of domestic administration and for overseas expeditionary missions, rather than large-scale major combat operations.
Lee Windsor, an expert on the Canadian military who teaches history at the University of New Brunswick, said the structure depicted in the chart would represent the most substantial change to the army in generations.
“It’s the next most significant major progression in the organization of the Canadian Army since 1941,” said Dr. Windsor, who is the university’s Fredrik S. Eaton Chair in Canadian Army Studies.
For decades, Canada has relied on allies to fill major battlefield gaps, particularly in long-range firepower and air defence. Dr. Windsor said the new structure suggests an effort to restore a sovereign combat capability able to operate with greater independence than the Canadian Army has possessed in decades.
“This is something that Canada has only ever done in the two World Wars,” he said.
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Lieutenant-Colonel Sandra Lévesque, of the army’s public-affairs department, confirmed the chart was from a presentation on the modernization structure. She said in an e-mailed statement that the Manoeuvre Division will serve as the army’s “high-readiness formation,” with brigades across five provinces.
“The Canadian Army is replacing its current regional and administrative-focused structure with a mission-first, effects-driven model consisting of three divisions and a training formation,” she wrote.
The chart outlines new heavy and medium cavalry battalions within the Manoeuvre Division. These are armoured formations built around tanks and other mechanized fighting vehicles. Today, Canada’s 90 Leopard 2 tanks are spread across three regiments, with only a fraction combat-ready at any given time. If the chart follows similar NATO allied armoured force sizes, the new force could potentially double Canada’s armoured strength.
Among the brigades in the division would be a newly proposed Fire Brigade, whose purpose would be long-range fire. It would include multiple battalions of self-propelled artillery, a rocket artillery battalion centred on the U.S.-made M142 HIMARS system and a dedicated drone battalion. Together, they represent capabilities absent from the current army.
The Pentagon has said that construction of Canada’s HIMARS will be complete by April, 2028. Apart from that, the other plans will require additional manufacturing and procurement.
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The army would be adding such capabilities at a time when modern conflicts such as Russia’s war with Ukraine are increasingly fought with drones and other sensors to strike targets dozens or even hundreds of kilometres away.
“The Canadian division could be able to fight on the same terms as a Russian adversary or even a Chinese adversary, with all the same kinds of long-range deep-strike capability,” Dr. Windsor said.
Also within the Manoeuvre Division, a proposed Protection Brigade would include ground-based air defence battalions, filling a gap left when Canada disbanded its last such unit in 1992. Today, ubiquitous drones and contested airspace have made that absence increasingly difficult to ignore. For the first time, the army appears to be establishing a dedicated Aviation Brigade, bringing helicopter assets under its own command rather than relying on the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Other elements include electronic warfare, signals intelligence and psychological operations, reflecting the less visible but equally decisive dimensions of modern conflict. These forces are used to disrupt enemy communications and drones, identify targets, protect friendly forces, and shape the rapidly evolving information battlefield alongside traditional combat units. “It looks to me like we’re getting back into the business of being able to deploy a division,” Dr. Windsor said.
That ambition, however, comes with significant challenges. Canada has historically struggled to generate manpower and capabilities of this scale. Even at its Cold War height around 1953, with around 15,000 personnel, it could maintain only a single brigade in Europe. A division is between three and five times that size. The constraints are not just financial. Dr. Windsor said training and retaining personnel “responsible for accruing these systems” may prove just as decisive as procurement itself.
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There is also the reality of timing. Building new units takes years, and equipment often arrives long after formations are established. Dr. Windsor predicted a gap between when those units begin to assemble and when the new equipment arrives.
“It’s going to be a tall order to fill,” he said.
In March, Canada officially hit the defence spending target of 2 per cent of gross domestic product set by NATO member countries more than a decade earlier. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that current plans will enable Canada to reach the new NATO target of 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence spending, plus an extra 1.5 per cent on security and defence-related infrastructure.
For the 2026-27 fiscal year, between the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, planned spending will total more than $51.7-billion, up from the 2025-26 forecast of $46.8-billion.
Since the release of the army’s modernization plan, titled Inflection Point 2025, senior leadership has spoken openly about the need to rebuild readiness and expand formations in anticipation of high-intensity peer conflict.
“This structure will institutionalize persistent readiness, rapid regeneration and scalable mobilization,” the commander of the Canadian Army, Lieutenant-General Michael Wright, said at the Landpower Conference in Calgary this March.
The plan will depend on funding, political will and a procurement system long plagued by delays. Yet according to Dr. Windsor, the message to allies is less complex. “It sends a signal that Canada is standing firm with its NATO partners.”