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 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.
The announcement comes amid growing recognition that the U.S. defense industrial base is misaligned with modern conflict. Across ships, aircraft, munitions, and autonomous systems, programs extend years beyond schedule, designs struggle to converge, and production systems fail to scale when requirements evolve. For example, the U.S. Navy's Constellation-class frigate program has absorbed billions in cost with no operational ships delivered, while advanced fighter and weapons platforms routinely take more than a decade to field. Munitions stockpiles remain constrained, and efforts to surge production continue to expose brittle supply chains.
“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.”
The event will function as a working session, examining key structural constraints such as 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 to carry this effort forward.
The Protocase Companies bring a track record of convening stakeholders around complex challenges. As a founding contributor to the Canadian Space Launch Conference, Protocase played a role in aligning stakeholders around sovereign launch capability. The company has also been active within Canada's defense industrial base, engaging with the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries and at CANSEC.
For more information, visit the event landing page at https://www.protocase.com/events/velocity-summit/.
The Velocity Summit is structured deliberately as a focused working session rather than a traditional conference. Participants will include stakeholders from 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.
