Simulation environments have quietly become the layer where the world’s leading defence and autonomous-systems programs do two things at once: define the capability requirements for the next generation of platforms, and develop the sovereign capability that carries today’s technologies from research into real-world test and deployment.

The US Department of Defence stood up an enterprise autonomy pipeline in 2026 and used it to convert an Army Infantry Squad Vehicle from a bare-bones truck into a fully autonomous system in ten days. The UK Ministry of Defence has committed £2B to an Army Collective Training Service anchored on a shared synthetic-environment platform used simultaneously for requirements development, doctrine rehearsal and industry engagement. The IDF runs cloud-native mission simulation across land, air and marine domains as its default development, training and validation environment — including the AI-based combat-logistics system Rafael and IAI won against 100-company competition after Ukraine-war lessons learned. 

In every one of these programs, simulation is doing the same job. It defines the next-generation requirement in operational terms. It develops the sovereign capability that carries technologies from research through real-world tests and into deployment. And it accelerates the industry base by giving startups a shared surface to demonstrate capability against.

Canada has near-term applications for the same pattern. Current and emerging CAF autonomous-systems demand centres on five operational capability areas where Canadian industry has strong potential to lead: persistent ISR and communications relay in contested and communications-denied environments; autonomous cargo and logistics resupply across remote, austere and Arctic conditions; multi-domain coordination and manned-unmanned teaming; maritime domain awareness across both surface and subsurface; and long-endurance operations under Canadian environmental extremes (cold, wind, ice, sea state, boreal weather). Canadian companies working toward these operational calls do not yet have coordinated access to a shared simulation surface that would let them demonstrate against these use cases at the pace their US and allied competitors do. This roundtable is about showcasing how leveraging allied best practices with simulation can catalyze our future autonomous defence capabilities.

• A structured walk-through of how leading nations use simulation environments to define future autonomous-systems requirements — DARPA Assured Autonomy Tools Portal, UK MOD Single Synthetic Environment, IDF Elbit OneSim ecosystem, Waabi World, and Applied Intuition — with the specific requirements-development pattern each yields.
• A mapping of near-term Canadian Armed Forces operational capability calls onto the same simulation-testable use case categories the global reference programs already run against: persistent ISR and contested-communications relay, autonomous cargo and logistics resupply, multi-domain coordination and manned-unmanned teaming, maritime domain awareness (surface and subsurface), and long-endurance operations under Canadian environmental extremes.
• A demonstration of how simulation develops sovereign capability from research into deployment — the specific decision points where a technology matures into physical test and CAF-relevant deployment, and the evidence artifacts that decision requires.
• A live showcase of four Canadian autonomous-systems companies presenting how they could plug into a shared simulation environment to demonstrate next-generation capability against these operational use cases