A Canadian Division Built with Imaginary Blocks

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On September 10, the Canadian Army made one of the largest changes to its command structure in decades. The four divisions that have divided the Army geographically, with each responsible for units within a different part of Canadian territory, are being replaced by formations organized around particular purposes. Most visibly, 3rd Canadian Division will stand down in Edmonton and be replaced by 1st Canadian Division, which will become the Army’s Manoeuvre Division—housing most of the Army’s Regular Force units capable of expeditionary combat.

Under the new structure, all three Regular Force Canadian Mechanized Brigade Groups (CMBGs) will report to this 1st Canadian Division headquarters, instead of separate headquarters spread across the country, along with 6 Canadian Combat Support Brigade and three newly created formations: 1st Canadian Artillery Brigade, 1st Canadian Sustainment Brigade, and 3rd Canadian Light Infantry Regiment. These new formations will group the Army’s three existing Regular Force light infantry battalions under a single command, while the artillery and sustainment brigades provide dedicated divisional structures for artillery and sustainment capabilities. Despite the reorganization, little will change about where the Army’s soldiers and units below the division level are located. The units that are the building blocks of the Army’s formations are being moved around on the organizational chart but will remain where they are geographically on a map. This leaves open the question of whether the reorganization is functional or merely administrative.

1st Canadian Division is not the only place where the changes will become apparent. Under the existing system, regional division commanders have been responsible for a broad mixture of Regular Force units, Army Reserve formations, Rangers, bases and support organizations, and other activities within their areas. The Army has acknowledged that this arrangement worked reasonably well for administration, while also concluding in Inflection Point 2025, the Army’s restructuring master plan, that it “breeds inefficiencies, blurs accountability, and limits operational agility.”

Under the new structure, 2nd Canadian Division will become the Defence of Canada Division, responsible for ensuring the Army is prepared for domestic operations, while also bringing the Army Reserve and Canadian Rangers under a common national formation. Meanwhile, much of the Army’s institutional support will be brought under a dedicated Support Division. Although it is organizationally equivalent to the Army’s other divisions, the Support Division is not a deployable combat formation and is not a division in the traditional operational sense. It is a headquarters and support organization, set up to give it the authority and span of control needed to manage the Army’s base and institutional-support system across Canada. Finally, training will remain concentrated under the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre. This formation is not a division even in name; however, it occupies an equivalent position on the organizational chart.

The major driver for all these changes is most visible, however, in what is happening at 1st Canadian Division, which reflects the larger scale at which the Army now wants to be able to operate. A brigade is a combined-arms formation of approximately 5,000 soldiers and, in the Army’s current assessment, the primary level at which it must be able to fight. Canada has not deployed a full brigade outside Canada in over 30 years. Instead, its major overseas land deployments have been organized around smaller Canadian battlegroups, which have been ad hoc formations of 1,000 to 1,500 Army soldiers. At times, these battlegroups have been the nucleus of brigade-sized formations filled out by units from other countries, or part of larger Canadian deployments that included non-Army CAF forces. However, they have never involved a full Canadian brigade.

The lack of deployed Canadian brigades is not because they don’t exist on paper. Canada maintains three Canadian Mechanized Brigade Groups (CMBGs), but acknowledges that its existing structure, with each assigned to a different geographic division, means that it cannot deploy and sustain even one fully capable brigade for any length of time. Too much of each parent division’s capacity is wrapped up in its single CMBG for long-term deployment and sustainment to be managed effectively.

The Manoeuvre Division is intended to help the Army move beyond that limitation. Putting all three CMBGs under a single headquarters should make it easier to manage their readiness as parts of a common force and generally maintain at least one of them as a deployable brigade-sized unit. Under this design, the division will also retain resources in Canada to manage the sustainment of a brigade deployed overseas.

Bringing them under one headquarters also gives Canada a permanent framework through which it can begin generating, training, and potentially commanding a division-sized force supported by capabilities not usually found at the brigade level, including division-level artillery and long-range fires, wide-area ground-based air defence, expanded intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sensors, specialized protection and counter-drone capabilities, and the logistics, maintenance, medical, and transportation capacity needed to sustain 15,000 soldiers.

This does not necessarily mean that Canada will be able to deploy a full division overseas under this structure. At least in the near term, the new division may function more as the force-generation base for a sustained brigade-plus contribution than as a formation Canada could deploy overseas in full. The three CMBGs will still have to cycle through training, readiness, deployment, and reconstitution, and many of the building blocks required to make 1st Canadian Division a fully capable field formation, such as long-range fires and multi-layered air defence, do not yet exist within the Canadian Army. The Army is therefore establishing the structure of a division while much of the capability needed to fill that structure is still being developed. The significance of doing so may lie partly in what the new organization allows the Army to do in the meantime.

One version of that argument has already appeared within the Army’s professional discussion. In an August 2025 paper, Brigadier-General Louis Lapointe argued that Canada needed a “pre-crisis divisional framework” around which force structure, resources, training, and doctrine could be organized. He described such a framework as an “anchor for the development of new capabilities against doctrine,” while acknowledging that Canada might initially have to create a “skeleton structure” that could be expanded as additional capability became available. This was a professional opinion paper, not the Army’s formal modernization policy, although the structure now being implemented resembles much of what Lapointe described.

Lapointe largely seems to consider this in terms of a major conflict, with newly stood-up Canadian units filling out the divisional structure. However, it can also be thought of as a way to generate a multinational division. In the same way that a deployed Canadian battlegroup, supported by the structures of a brigade, has been used as the basis for multinational brigades in Latvia and Afghanistan, a Canadian brigade-plus deployment supported by divisional structures could have allied units attached to it to create a multinational division led by Canada.

There is already evidence of the Army using its developing divisional model in this way. In February 2026, the Canadian Army Land Warfare Centre conducted a divisional-level wargame examining how the formation would operate beyond the brigade-level close fight, including its artillery, reconnaissance, security, and sustainment functions. In an accompanying video, one participant described the exercise as “testing the organization that we built,” with the intent of learning where additional capability might be required. Making that structure permanent may allow the same process to continue within organizations that are responsible for producing the resulting combat capability.

The change in command relationships matters because it also changes where responsibility sits. This appears to be an intentional part of the new command model. During the Combined Army Conference in January, the Army said the new functional divisions would “broadly own the requirements” generated through the Managed Readiness Plan and would be able to “internally resource.” Lieutenant-General Michael Wright has separately described giving the developing plans to the incoming division commanders and requiring them to determine how they would accomplish their assigned tasks and what resources would be required to do so.

That may change how some of the Army’s longstanding capability gaps are resolved. It is already well established that the Army needs greater sustainment capacity, improved air defence, longer-range fires, and a variety of other capabilities. Attempting to make an actual formation work can add detail to those requirements. A divisional exercise can demonstrate how much ammunition must be moved, whether fires can reach far enough, where particular capabilities need to sit, what they depend upon, and what happens when they are absent. Repeated training and experimentation should allow those conclusions to become more specific as the division develops.

Responsibility for responding to those shortcomings will also sit more clearly within the formation encountering them. The commander responsible for the division’s operational output will have greater reason to determine what can be changed through its organization, training, and use of existing resources. A deficiency will not simply be something that another organization failed to provide. It will become part of the practical problem of making the division work.

Some of those problems will still require equipment, personnel, or funding from outside the division. Here, too, the new structure may help. A single chain of command will represent all the units experiencing the problem and should be better placed to explain how the deficiency affects the formation as a whole. That may produce a clearer distinction between the shortcomings the division can address itself and those that require action elsewhere, along with a better-supported explanation of what is needed and why.

There are, of course, limits to how much responsibility can accomplish without corresponding authority. Discussing procurement, Wright acknowledged that the Army does not yet have the delegation of authority it wants and observed that mission command does not translate readily into the procurement system. Inflection Point 2025 says the implementation directives flowing from the modernization strategy are intended to assign the resources and authorities needed to execute the changes. Those detailed directives do not appear to be publicly available, making it difficult to determine exactly where those authorities will ultimately sit.

Changing command relationships will not itself provide the capabilities 1st Canadian Division needs. It may, however, give the Army a permanent formation within which to identify those needs, test possible solutions, and distinguish between problems it can address internally and those requiring action elsewhere.

Whether that produces better results will take years to determine. Drawing the missing blocks on an organizational chart does not make the capabilities they represent real, but it gives the Army a permanent place to determine what belongs inside them and what will be required to put it there. The soldiers may remain on the same bases, and many of the units will retain the same equipment and personnel they had the day before. What changes is who owns the problem of turning them into a formation capable of fighting together.

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