Distributed Defence: Lessons from Professional Regulation (and Luhmann)

Canada’s recent Defence Industrial Strategy presents itself as a project of national economic alignment. It aims, in short, to align federal and military investment with Canada’s industrial sector, including supply chains, critical minerals, AI development, and more. The result, ideally, is a more robust, more sovereign, more autonomous military industrial complex rooted in Canadian industry and governance, one better equipped to confront the persistent geopolitical and economic pressures that have come to define the twenty-first century.

“Canada first” is the governing sentiment here—Canadian military, Canadian supply chains, Canadian minerals, and so forth, —and even critics on the left may find something to endorse in this emphasis on domestic capacity. At the same time, others on the left (or further left) may question the wisdom of investing in any form of military build-up or armament, even the homegrown variety. 

In the 1980s, Carl Sagan famously claimed that the U.S.’s investment of trillions and trillions into Cold War militarization (a play on his “billions and billions” phrase) was aimed at the possibility of dangerous action from the Soviet Union,; so why not invest trillions and trillions into the problem of global warming, a threat with at least as much potential risk as Soviet adventurism? One might similarly compare a contemporary uptick in Canadian military investment with a relative paucity of environmental spending (at least as a centralized funding priority).   

Without resolving that tension—and perhaps with it lingering in the background—the Defence Industrial Strategy is also underpinned by a familiar policy logic of return on investment (ROI), in which public investment is expected to produce predictable and measurable outcomes according to specific timetables. While this logic can be effective in more straightforward or discrete procurement contexts, its extension into large-scale industrial and military transformation raises more difficult questions. 

In previous CSPC editorials, I explored the relevance of systems theory—particularly the work of Niklas Luhmann—to public policy, and later with a specific focus on climate change, using professional regulation as a case study. Central to this approach is Luhmann’s account of a functionally differentiated society, in which social systems—the political system, the economic system, the legal system, the scientific system, and others—operate autonomously according to their own codes and logics. When these systems interact, as they inevitably do, they process information through their own systemic “languages.” This perspective, I argued, is especially well suited to understanding complex, policy-oriented activity in modern technological societies.

Despite structural differences, communication among systems is entirely possible (and essential). Luhmann accounts for this through “structural coupling,” which describes the institutional and organizational mechanisms that enable information to move across systemic boundaries. The Defence Industrial Strategy accounts for this type of interaction: procurement frameworks, funding programs, and public-private partnerships function as structural couplings, creating channels through which information is translated across systemic logics and through which coordination becomes possible, albeit partial and contingent.

What the Strategy does not fully account for—and what is often missed in conventional policy frameworks—is the structural autonomy of each system. As information passes, it is reinterpreted by the receiving system according to its own logic or “language.” Something is always lost—or at least altered—in translation, much as when Kant is translated into English, or when math is rendered linguistically; the result is not simple miscommunication, but a structural limit on the coherence and unification any policy can achieve across autonomous systems.

The transactions envisioned by the Defence Strategy must be understood as open-ended and, to a degree, uncertain; they carry the promise of coordination and ROI, but remain only partially defined and not reliably predictable. This is one reason why Luhmann described system interactions as “irritations”: one system may “irritate” another through its communications, and that perturbation may provoke action, but the interaction is fundamentally non-hierarchical and non-deterministic. 

Canada’s experience with professional regulation offers a useful parallel. Since the mid-nineteenth century, professions such as medicine and law have been governed through semi-autonomous bodies known as “colleges.” While formally tied to provincial governments, these institutions enact and interpret legislation through their own codes and standards, mediated by statutory mandates, reporting requirements, and public accountability mechanisms.

At the same time, professionals themselves—surgeons, engineers, lawyers—sit on the boards of colleges and help shape the institutions and their regulatory practices. Professional regulation thus unfolds as a multifaceted process of negotiation and translation among policymakers, regulators, professionals, and the public, each operating according to distinct institutional logics and mandates. A regulatory body may “irritate” its profession by introducing new practice guidance related to AI, for instance, but such guidance is not simply implemented; it is reinterpreted within professional practice, prompting a range of possible responses. 

In terms of logic and language, concepts such as legitimacy, safety, and public trust are at the core of health profession regulation; —they create a framework for understanding and interpreting external information, and they guide appropriate responses to those pesky “irritations.” By contrast, defence systems often orient themselves around national risk, secrecy, discretion, and the management of sensitive information—priorities that do not always sit easily alongside broader public-facing values. As that system becomes more distributed—that is, as it expands to interface with other institutions, programs, and mandates—its policy objectives become increasingly intangible and speculative.  

This is not an efficient arrangement, but the lesson from professional regulation (and Luhmann) does not have to be exclusively critical. Rather, the inclusion of other systems—of other perspectives and actors—can, under certain conditions, strengthen the originating system’s output. In health profession regulation, for example, the inclusion of multiple decision-makers does not always produce faster or more efficient decision-making, but it does incorporate information and detail from related systems, creating a form of tentative consensus that broadens and potentially enhances the resulting policy or decision. 

In short, when systems interface through “structural coupling,” they are forced to check and counterbalance one another. The resulting output carries the imprint of multiple systemic languages and perspectives, which through a series of messy interactions and irritations have created a space—however provisional—for exchange, interpretation, and collaboration. 

A fully “unified system,” then—whether in defence or regulation—is neither possible nor desirable, particularly when it extends across a range of institutions and mandates. Policymakers are better served when they think in terms of distributed decision-making and recognize the autonomy and self-determination of surrounding systems. Health profession regulation, for all its imperfections, demonstrates how intricate, self-determining systems are coordinated without being centralized—how autonomy and collective action can coexist, albeit in distributed and heterogeneous patterns. The Canadian defence sector, now entering a period of renewed investment, attention, and possibly expansion, may emerge less as a coherent project than as a distributed and continually negotiated set of relations.