Alliance integration and defence industrial resilience in Italy and Canada

Recent debates on defence industrial policy focus on resilience, strategic autonomy, and alliance co-operation, often assuming that these goals reinforce one another. How they interact within allied defence-industrial supply chains, however, remains insufficiently examined. This contribution explores the conditions under which alliance integration strengthens, rather than constrains, defence-industrial resilience in middle powers. The analysis compares Italy and Canada, allies embedded in distinct transatlantic industrial settings. Italy combines domestic system-integration capacity with participation in European frameworks, whilst Canada relies more heavily on United States-centred industrial ecosystems. Attention is given to governance arrangements, system-integration authority, and supply-chain dependencies to show how different forms of alliance embeddedness shape resilience outcomes during rearmament and geopolitical fragmentation. Delegated sovereignty describes alliance-based industrial arrangements in which key functions are externalised while operational credibility is preserved through access to allied ecosystems. Defence-industrial resilience emerges less from control or integration alone than from the capacity to manage dependence.