Canada buys Australian Arctic radar in A$2.5bn defence-export first

Australia has been refining the same unusual piece of radar for decades, a system that bounces signals off the ionosphere to see thousands of kilometres past the curve of the Earth, and for all that time it kept the technology to itself. On Sunday it sold it abroad for the first time.

Canada agreed to buy an Arctic over-the-horizon radar built on Australian technology in a deal worth around A$2.5bn, or roughly US$1.75bn, which Canberra called its largest-ever defence export.

The agreement was signed in Canberra by Australia’s deputy prime minister and defence minister, Richard Marles, and Canada’s secretary of state for defence procurement, Stephen Fuhr.

It builds on the Jindalee Operational Radar Network, the system Australia uses to watch its own northern approaches, which Canberra describes as the world’s leading large-scale, long-range over-the-horizon radar, capable of surveillance at ranges of roughly 1,000 to 3,000 kilometres. BAE Systems Australia is the prime contractor.

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What Canada is buying the radar to do is watch the Arctic. As the polar ice thins and the region opens to traffic and contest, Ottawa has been looking for ways to see across a vast and largely empty north, and over-the-horizon radar offers a way to monitor airspace for aircraft and missiles without dotting the tundra with conventional installations.

The purchase is a piece of Canada’s NORAD modernisation, the C$38.6bn programme it announced in 2022 to upgrade continental defence over two decades alongside the United States.

The deal has been a while coming. Prime Minister Mark Carney signalled Canada’s intention to partner with Australia on Arctic radar in early 2025, the two governments signed a technology partnership that June, and Canada selected its first sites later in the year after public consultation, with reporting pointing to the Kawartha Lakes region of southern Ontario. The full system is not expected to be operational for years.

For Australia, the appeal is partly industrial. The sale is expected to support hundreds of jobs at home, and BAE Systems Australia has committed to working with Canadian firms to build the radar locally and strengthen Canada’s defence industrial base, with the construction phase projected to create thousands of jobs a year in Canada through the early 2030s.

Exporting a sovereign capability also deepens a defence relationship between two middle powers that increasingly find themselves aligned, both treaty partners of the United States and both wary of the same shifts in the Pacific and the Arctic.

There is a strategic logic underneath the hardware. Over-the-horizon radar is having a moment precisely because it is cheap to run relative to its reach and hard to evade, and because the threats it is good at spotting, long-range aircraft and cruise missiles, are the ones that worry NORAD planners most.

Selling the technology rather than merely operating it turns a decades-old Australian research programme into an export line, and gives Canberra a stake in how a close ally watches its own frontier.

The wider backdrop is a defence-technology market awash with money and urgency, with capital pouring into European defence funds and startups alike, and governments under pressure to close the gap between what they can build and what they need.

Much of that surge has been about software and space, with firms like Planet Labs selling persistent satellite surveillance to NATO and national militaries, and a wave of younger companies chasing drones and air defence. The common thread is the same one running through the Arctic deal: the ability to see first, across distances that used to be blind spots.

What makes the radar sale a different kind of story is its age. Most of the attention in defence tech has gone to software, autonomy, and orbit. This deal is a reminder that some of the most valuable defence technology is decades old, physically enormous, and built around bending radio waves over the horizon. Australia spent half a century perfecting it, and Canada has just become the first country willing to pay for a copy.