Protocase Companies Launch Velocity Summit to Tackle Slow U.S. Defense Manufacturing
The Velocity Summit convenes defense, government, and industry leaders to address structural barriers slowing U.S. military production, aiming to form a cross-sector working group for faster design-to-deployment cycles.
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 built in partnership with stakeholders across industry, government, and academia.
The initiative comes amid mounting evidence that U.S. defense manufacturing is misaligned with modern conflict. 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. 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 summit 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 that can carry this effort forward collaboratively.
The Protocase Companies bring a track record of convening stakeholders around complex national challenges. As a founding contributor to the Canadian Space Launch Conference, Protocase helped align defense, government, academia, and industry 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 participating at CANSEC, the country’s leading defense and security trade event. These experiences reflect a consistent role: bringing the right stakeholders together, contributing practical perspectives from manufacturing, and supporting early alignment around system-level challenges.
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.
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, visit the event landing page at https://www.protocase.com/events/velocity-summit/.