Protocase Companies Launch Inaugural Velocity Summit to Tackle Defense Manufacturing Speed

The Protocase Companies today announced the inaugural Velocity Summit, a national convening focused on one of the most pressing challenges in U.S. defense: the inability to design, build, and deploy military capability at the speed modern conflict demands. The Summit will take place on November 17, 2026, in Wilmington, North Carolina, bringing together leaders across defense, government, advanced manufacturing, and emerging technology.

Rather than introducing a predefined solution, the Velocity Summit is designed to bring together a critical mass of stakeholders to develop a shared understanding of the problem and begin shaping a coordinated path forward. A central objective of the event is to explore the formation of a sustained, cross-sector working group over time, built in partnership with the right stakeholders across industry, government, and academia.

Across ships, aircraft, munitions, and autonomous systems, the pattern is increasingly clear. Programs extend years beyond schedule, designs struggle to converge, and production systems fail to scale when requirements evolve. The U.S. Navy’s Constellation-class frigate program has absorbed billions in cost with no operational ships delivered. Advanced fighter and weapons platforms routinely take more than a decade to field. At the same time, munitions stockpiles remain constrained, and efforts to surge production continue to expose brittle supply chains. These are not isolated breakdowns. They reflect a deeper structural issue. The defense industrial base remains optimized for predictability, while modern conflict increasingly demands adaptability, iteration, and speed.

“The United States doesn’t have a talent problem or a funding problem. It has a systems problem,” said Dr. Doug Milburn, Chairman of The Protocase Companies. “We are asking industrial models built for certainty to operate in conditions defined by change. That gap is where time is lost.”

While the need for faster, more adaptive manufacturing models is widely acknowledged, there has been limited coordination across stakeholders to address it in a sustained and structured way. The Velocity Summit is intended to begin closing that gap. The event will function as a working session, bringing together a select group of participants to examine key structural constraints and identify areas of alignment. These include how manufacturing systems can better absorb variation, how acquisition models can surface risk earlier, and how organizations can increase their capacity to learn and adapt in real time.

A longer-term ambition is to help create the conditions for a standing working group or coalition that can carry this effort forward. Any such effort would be developed collaboratively, informed by the insights and priorities of the stakeholders engaged through the Summit and subsequent discussions. The Protocase Companies bring a track record of helping translate complex national challenges into coordinated cross-sector dialogue that can evolve into meaningful action over time. As a founding contributor to the Canadian Space Launch Conference, Protocase played a role in convening stakeholders across defense, government, academia, and industry to align around sovereign launch capability. That effort helped frame the issue as a national priority and contributed to broader coordination across the ecosystem.

In parallel, Protocase has been an active participant within Canada’s defense industrial base, including alignment with the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries and engagement at CANSEC, the country’s leading defense and security trade event. Through this involvement, the company has engaged with senior leaders across government and industry on issues including procurement modernization, industrial readiness, and supply chain resilience. These experiences reflect a consistent role: helping bring the right stakeholders into the same room, contributing practical perspectives from the manufacturing front lines, and supporting early alignment around complex, system-level challenges. The Velocity Summit is intended to apply that same approach to the challenge of defense manufacturing speed in the United States, with a focus on listening first, aligning stakeholders, and building toward durable collaboration.

The Summit is structured deliberately as a focused working session rather than a traditional conference. Participants will include stakeholders across the U.S. Department of Defense and federal agencies, prime contractors and emerging defense innovators, advanced manufacturing and supply chain leaders, academic and applied research institutions, and policy and regulatory experts. The objective is to identify practical pathways to reduce design-to-production timelines, strengthen domestic manufacturing resilience, and enable more responsive scaling of mission-critical systems. Insights from the Summit will inform ongoing dialogue among participants, with the goal of determining whether and how a more formalized working group should take shape over time. For more information please visit the event landing page: https://www.protocase.com/events/velocity-summit/.