Designing Inclusive Defence Readiness Pathways A Canada-Focused Research Programme on Veteran Expertise, Capability Translation, and GBA Plus

Canada's defence readiness will depend, over the coming decade, not only on equipment and industrial capacity but on how well the country recognises and uses the expertise it already has. Instructors, evaluators, simulator specialists, standards personnel, safety professionals, veterans, retired military members, allied-trained experts, and defence-adjacent civilian specialists all hold capability relevant to training readiness and institutional resilience. Much of it goes unused, because the route from proven experience to lawful, standards-aligned, non-operational contribution remains fragmented, informal, and poorly documented. This paper sets out a Canada-focused research programme to address that gap. It develops the Capability Translation Framework introduced in Working Paper No. 1 into a structured, fundable body of applied policy research. The programme asks how Canada could design evidence-based, GBA Plus-informed pathways to identify veteran and allied expertise, assess role fit, define national-context gaps, screen pathway risks, and strengthen training-readiness policy without lowering standards or implying unauthorised operational authority. The work aligns primarily with the MINDS Defence Policy Challenge on supporting our people recruitment, retention, workforce sustainability, and structural reform in personnel systems and connects to whole-of-society defence, partnerships, and resilience. GBA Plus is treated as a design method rather than a closing section: the programme asks how women veterans, allied-experienced women, older veterans, racialized professionals, internationally credentialed experts, caregivers, people with disabilities, and those with non-linear service histories may be excluded by informal recognition even when their experience is directly relevant. The proposed output is a twelve-month research programme producing policy briefs, a methodology guide, a GBA Plus design tool, an academic article, and public-facing outputs to support Canadian defence and security policy discussion. This is a public, non-sensitive, applied policy research output containing no classified, protected, controlled, operational, or personal defence information. The paper sets out the conceptual framework and research design; the applied instruments that operationalise it remain proprietary work of MAK Operational Systems Limited.