WILMINGTON, NC - The Protocase Companies today announced the inaugural Velocity Summit, a national convening focused on 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 develop a shared understanding of the problem and shape 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 responds to a pattern of delays across ships, aircraft, munitions, and autonomous systems. 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, while munitions stockpiles remain constrained and efforts to surge production 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 to examine structural constraints, including how manufacturing systems can absorb variation, how acquisition models can surface risk earlier, and how organizations can increase capacity to learn and adapt in real time. The long-term ambition is to create conditions for a standing working group or coalition, developed collaboratively with stakeholders engaged through the Summit and subsequent discussions.
The Protocase Companies bring a track record of convening cross-sector dialogue. As a founding contributor to the Canadian Space Launch Conference, Protocase helped align 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. These experiences reflect a consistent role: bringing stakeholders together, contributing practical perspectives from manufacturing, and supporting early alignment around complex challenges.
The Velocity Summit is intended to apply that same approach to defense manufacturing speed in the United States, with a focus on listening first, aligning stakeholders, and building toward durable collaboration. Participants will include stakeholders from the U.S. Department of Defense, prime contractors, emerging defense innovators, advanced manufacturing leaders, academic institutions, and policy 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 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/.
