Why Continuous Innovation and Continuous Deployment will define the next era of military power.
By Chad Steelberg, Founder and CEO, Tiberius Aerospace
The weapon is not merely the round, missile, drone, or platform.
The weapon is the system capable of conceiving it, engineering it, proving it, producing it, fielding it, learning from it and improving it—again and again, faster than the threat can adapt.
Engineers are part of the weapon. Digital models are part of the weapon. Prototype shops and test ranges are part of the weapon. So are the qualification evidence, software, suppliers, production capacity, operational data, and legal authorities that allow a capability to move from an idea into the hands of a warfighter.
The factory matters. But it is only one node in a much larger system.
For most of the past three decades, military power was measured by what a nation had already built. Deterrence was largely a matter of inventory: how many rounds, interceptors, and platforms were sitting in storage, ready for the day they might be needed.
Stockpiles remain essential. But this decade’s wars have exposed the limits of treating inventory as the ultimate measure of readiness.
Inventory is a snapshot. Industrial agility is a rate.
The decisive question is not simply what a nation possesses on the first day of a conflict. It is what that nation can replace, reconfigure, and improve by the 30th, 100th, and 1,000th day.
An adversary is deterred not only by the weapons it can count, but by the capability it cannot easily calculate: how quickly an allied industrial system can respond after the first salvo, route around a disrupted supplier, answer a new countermeasure, and return an improved system to the fight.
The West does not have a defense-spending problem. It has a conversion problem.
The money is arriving. The technology exists. The demand is undeniable. Yet between an appropriation and a battlefield effect sits an industrial architecture that still takes too long to turn capital into capability.
Capital is not capability. A contract is not capability. A prototype is not capability.
Capability is something tested, qualified, fielded, replenishable—and continuously improving.
At the 2025 Hague Summit, NATO allies committed to invest 5 percent of GDP in defense and security by 2035, including substantial investments in military capability, infrastructure, resilience and the defense industrial base. It was a historic commitment. But spending commitments do not automatically become military power. The strategic challenge is converting those resources into actual fielded capability. NATO itself now recognizes that industrial capacity is not an administrative function beneath deterrence. It is part of deterrence.
Pouring more money into the same architecture can increase order books without increasing military output at the speed the threat requires. A 20th-century development and production model does not become a 21st-century one merely because it receives a larger budget.
Ukraine has demonstrated the alternative under the most unforgiving conditions.
Its most important lesson is not simply that inexpensive systems can defeat expensive ones. It is that battlefield advantage increasingly belongs to the side with the shortest learning cycle.
Operational feedback reaches engineers. Engineers revise the design. Prototypes are built and tested. Qualified manufacturers incorporate the change. The improved capability returns to the field. New operational data comes back—and the cycle begins again.
Ukraine is not simply procuring faster. It has built an ecosystem that learns faster.
Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, has expressed the strategic principle plainly: “Our advantage lies in our ability to adapt faster than our adversaries.” His emphasis is not innovation theater. It is testing what exists, learning quickly, integrating what works, and turning that learning into usable capability. That is the real competition.
Winning tomorrow’s conflicts will depend less on who builds the best weapon once than on who can improve it the fastest.
The software industry developed CI/CD, continuous integration and continuous delivery, to replace large, infrequent releases with a persistent cycle of development, testing, deployment, and learning.
Defense needs its own, more demanding version of CI/CD:
Continuous Innovation. Continuous Deployment.
Continuous Innovation means that a fielded system is never treated as finished. It becomes the baseline for the next improvement. Operational data flows back into engineering. New sensors, materials, software, seekers, payloads, and manufacturing methods can be evaluated against an existing configuration instead of forcing the program to begin again.
Continuous deployment means those improvements do not remain trapped in a laboratory, a demonstration or a briefing. They move through testing, certification, authorization and production into fielded service—safely, repeatedly and at the speed of relevance.
This is not reckless iteration.
A weapon is not a smartphone application. But neither is it a museum piece.
Defense cannot adopt Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. National security demands independent testing, configuration control, cybersecurity, export authorization, sovereign authority, and proof that a system will perform in the mission environment.
The answer is not to move slowly. It is to move fast and prove things.
Every material claim must survive physics, manufacturing, and the mission environment. The objective is a governed engineering cycle in which evidence moves as quickly and reliably as the technology itself. Rigor remains non-negotiable, but rigor can no longer become an excuse for immobility.
Today, defense development, testing, procurement, and manufacturing are too often treated as separate processes managed by separate organizations, separate data systems, and separate economic incentives. Requirements are frozen. Engineering data becomes fragmented. Qualification evidence is difficult to reuse. Production is concentrated. Operational feedback arrives late, if it arrives at all.
That is not a learning system. It is a series of handoffs.
The alternative is a governed digital thread connecting operational requirements, engineering models, software, bills of material, test results, suppliers, manufacturing plans, configuration records, export authorizations, and field-performance data.
When a component improves, you can measure it against a known baseline and introduce it through controlled requalification. When one supplier fails, another qualified source can be activated. When a battlefield requirement changes, the response can begin in the engineering cycle rather than the next decade’s budget cycle.
The system becomes a closed loop:
Operational need becomes engineering action. Engineering action becomes a tested prototype. A tested prototype becomes a qualified design. A qualified design becomes distributed production. Production becomes fielded capability. Fielded performance becomes evidence for the next improvement.
Then the loop closes again—faster.
This also requires separating design authority from fabrication.
The organization responsible for the system must preserve intellectual property, configuration control, and the continuous engineering baseline. But fabrication should be able to move across a federated network of qualified manufacturers operating under controlled interfaces and common evidence.
Governments gain sovereign production capacity and domestic economic value. Manufacturers compete to produce validated designs. Second sources can be activated before a crisis becomes a shortage. The design authority remains economically responsible—and economically incentivized—to improve effectiveness, availability, and affordability throughout the capability’s service life.
This is not outsourcing sovereignty. It is a practical way to build it.
Sovereignty should be architectural, not rhetorical. A nation is not sovereign because it assembled a product once. It is sovereign when it has enduring access to the engineering knowledge, technical evidence, skilled workforce, production capacity, and legal authority required to replenish, sustain, and improve that capability under pressure.
NATO’s newly announced “Engine,” intended to connect defense companies with available manufacturing capacity across the alliance, is a meaningful step in this direction. Secretary General Mark Rutte has correctly observed that “no single nation has the industrial capacity” to meet the alliance’s growing demand.
But available factory capacity alone does not create an industrial system.
A network is only as powerful as the engineering standards, qualification evidence, digital infrastructure, operating authorities, and incentives connecting it. Without those elements, distributed manufacturing is simply a collection of buildings. With them, it becomes a resilient allied capability network that can learn, qualify, and scale as one.
At Tiberius, this is the thinking behind Defense-as-a-Service.
DaaS is not a financing construct or a subscription attached to a weapon. It is an economic and industrial model for continuously delivering capability. It combines ongoing research and development, modular engineering, sovereign licensed production, federated manufacturing, operational feedback, and controlled technology insertion within one persistent system.
The objective is not to sell a product and wait for its eventual replacement. It is to maintain a strategic collaboration through which the capability becomes more effective, more producible and more affordable throughout its operational life.
That changes what governments should measure.
Platform counts, contract values, and factory output are not enough. Defense leaders should ask:
- How long does it take to move from an operational need to a tested, fielded change?
- How rapidly can an engineering team respond to a new threat or countermeasure?
- How many prototype, test, and qualification cycles can be completed in a year?
- How quickly can a second source be qualified?
- How much can production surge without constructing an entirely new dedicated facility?
- How rapidly can an allied nation establish sovereign production?
- How much more effective and affordable does a system become after deployment?
- And what is its actual cost per effect—not simply its unit price?
These are not secondary industrial metrics. They are measures of military readiness.
The lowest-priced weapon is not economical if it cannot be replenished, upgraded, or produced at scale. The most sophisticated platform is not strategically superior if the threat can adapt faster than the system behind it.
A single breakthrough technology, a single company, or a single factory will not define the future of defense. It will be defined by the speed and integrity of the entire capability loop—from operational need to proven effect and back again.
Stockpiles will matter. Engineers will matter. Test ranges, suppliers and production capacity will matter. But the decisive advantage will belong to the allied system that can continuously innovate, deploy, and learn—faster than its adversaries can adapt.
The weapon is no longer just the object delivered to the battlefield.
The weapon is the system that builds, proves, fields, and improves it.
Chad Steelberg is the founder and CEO of Tiberius Aerospace, a defense technology company developing precision-strike systems and digital industrial infrastructure under a sovereign, licensed Defense-as-a-Service model. He previously founded and served as CEO / Chairman of AdForce (IPO 1999), dMarc (acquired by Google 2006), and Veritone (IPO 2017).
