The Fielding Report

The Fielding Report measures the distance between defense-tech announcements and the battlefield — a quarterly census of the weapon systems startups and neo-primes actually get into service. Edition 1 publishes in Q3 2026. This page is its public preregistration: the rules below were locked on July 12, 2026, before any system was selected, and any later change ships as a logged amendment.

Why preregister a report?

Defense tech runs on conflating announcements with deliveries. Press releases become "operational" in marketing copy; framework agreements get reported as orders; combat evaluations get sold as combat records. A census like this is only worth citing if the publisher cannot quietly tune who counts, what counts, or which number leads after seeing the results. So we fixed those rules first, in public.

What Edition 1 will report

• The cohort: systems from defense-tech companies founded 2000 or later, first publicly announced between January 1, 2022 and August 31, 2025. Every rule-eligible system is included — there are no discretionary picks, and every exclusion is logged with a coded reason.
• The milestones: announcement, public demonstration, qualifying procurement, operational fielding, and publicly documented combat employment — tracked as independent events, not a forced ladder. A contract can precede an unveiling; a system can reach the front through donations or Ukraine's Brave1 credits without a classic contract. Both realities are recorded as they happened.
• The headline metric, fixed in advance: the share of systems reaching documented operational fielding within 24 months of first public announcement. That number — with its full numerator and denominator — leads the report and cannot be swapped for a more flattering or more dramatic result after the fact.
• The lags: how long each step takes, computed only from dates precise enough to support the math, with exclusions counted in the open.

Evidence standards

• Hard claims — contracts, combat employment — require two independent sources; single-source claims are labeled, never silently promoted.
• "Combat employment" starts at mission-employed, publicly documented. Theater presence and marketing language do not qualify.
• Tenders and unexercised options never count as contracts.
• Every published conclusion carries a citation, an evidence date, and a confidence label.

What the report will not say

Documented combat employment records that a system was publicly reported in use. It does not validate effectiveness, survivability, or reliability, and it is not an endorsement of any system or company.

Corrections and challenges

Companies named in the report may challenge any row with documentation: acknowledgment within five business days, resolution target of fifteen. Documentation can correct the record; no one can veto it. Corrections ship as logged restatements — frozen editions are never silently rewritten.

Edition 1 — Q3 2026

The pilot edition covers a preregistered cohort of roughly 25–40 systems, free to read, with the full dataset and per-event evidence ledgers available to BattlePolicy Pro subscribers. Subscribe free to receive it on release.