Continuous Delivery – The Logistics of Software, Data, and AI

Jez describes the first principles of continuous delivery as:

• “Build quality in”: This echoes the Special Operations Forces adage that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Do the little things right the first time you do them. Don’t pass quality down the value chain for others to handle.
• “Work in small batches”: The effectiveness of working in small batches is directly related to human cognitive performance. We humans can mentally maintain and process only small batches; five to nine tasks, on average. When you keep your Work In Progress (WIP) low, you reduce the room for error by allowing your mind to focus on a smaller task load. This is good for your brain, and it’s good for quality.
• “Computers perform repetitive tasks, people solve problems”: As technology inevitably does improve and is delivered, both by LMI and others, technology’s role becomes to elevate the decisions humans must make. Instead of deciding which application version is deployed, the computers allow the human to trust that the latest stable release of that version is deployed.
• “Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement”: There will always be constraints to delivering value. It’s our job as the professional “digital logisticians” to relentlessly attack those constraints, open bottlenecks, and improve flow of value to the endpoints at which our bytes must arrive intact and on time.
• “Everyone is responsible”: The value chain is only as strong and resilient as its weakest link. When one link shucks their responsibility for quality, the lack of quality cascades down the value chain, and the effect is amplified at every step of that chain. There’s a flip side, though. As humans, our behaviors are incentivized by our ability to perceive the environment. Making the value chain visible to everyone on that chain is one of the best incentives we can create to ensure responsibility – if you know the effect of your actions (or inaction), you are incentivized to ensure against negative consequences. In the tech world, we do this through chat operations (“ChatOps” – Teams, Slack, Mattermost, Element, etc.), peer code reviews, continuous integration (an app’s “pipeline”), continuous monitoring (both for security and stability), and other practices that increase observability and incentivize responsibility. 

There’s a nice quality to each of these principles. The titles themselves aren’t unique to the information technology world or the categories of software, data, AI, security, or the infrastructure on which they ride. The career supply chain analyst or military logistician likely already has in mind their own interpretations of how continuous delivery, military logistics, and supply chain risk management all relate.

The parallels between military logistics and the continuous delivery of logistics solutions are striking. I asked LIGER™, LMI's gen AI platform for government, to summarize the central principles of Joint Publication 4-0.

• Responsiveness: Ensuring the logistics system can promptly respond to the needs of the operation, providing the right supplies and services at the right time and place.
• Simplicity: Keeping logistics plans and operations straightforward to minimize confusion and maximize efficiency.
• Economy: Efficient use of resources to provide the best possible support without unnecessary expenditure or waste.
• Flexibility: Ability to adapt to changing circumstances and requirements in dynamic operational environments.
• Attainability: Setting realistic goals within the logistics plan that can be achieved with available resources.
• Sustainability: Capability to maintain operations over an extended period through adequate and continuous support.
• Survivability: Protecting logistics capabilities and ensuring they can continue to function even in adverse conditions or under attack.

As LIGER™ summarized the deep ties, “[both] military logistics and continuous delivery share common themes of efficiency, adaptability, and reliability, underscoring the importance of strategic planning, quality control, and iterative improvements to sustain ongoing operations effectively.”

"[Both] military logistics and continuous delivery share common themes of efficiency, adaptability, and reliability, underscoring the importance of strategic planning, quality control, and iterative improvements to sustain ongoing operations effectively.”

In other words, both continuous delivery and military logistics revolve around the common axis of delivering the right things frequently with high quality, persistently adapting to external factors that work against the flow of value.
 

Logistics in Action

I’ll cite an unclassified examples from my time in DoD. I led the U.S. Government’s TAK Product Center from 2021-2024. TAK, or the Team Awareness Kit, is a Government-developed and -stewarded software suite that enables secure real-time situational awareness and command and control from the fire team up through brigade, across all formations and Allied partners. In late February 2022, our 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) colleagues pulled us directly into U.S.-led C5ISR decision support to Ukraine special operations forces.

Every Second Counts in Combat Operations

From my arrival at TAK Product Center, I championed the overall value of continuous delivery and how solving for the constraints to delivery would provide broad, enduring impact to the DoD’s then-300,000 TAK end users. By middle 2022, our 1st SFC(A) colleagues needed to plot over 20,000 dynamically updating map items in TAK for their Ukraine counterparts to consume on their own ATAK devices.

Because we had already prioritized “Testability and Deployability” for the TAK software suite, and because that priority drove major improvements to TAK’s DoD DevSecOps Reference Design-compliant development platform, we were already in position to deploy these updates. We reduced ATAK’s build time from 24 hours to 50 minutes, implemented a common continuous integration (CI) framework across all products’ pipelines, streamlined the path to release versioned updates, transitioned our entire build and release infrastructure to hardened container images sourced from DoD IronBank and orchestrated by AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and directly integrated all quality and security CI gates into our ChatOps.

Our strategic emphasis on the elements of continuous delivery allowed us to ship the improved map engine almost immediately, and this had an immediate impact on tactical combat operations. Because we saw firsthand the powerful outcomes associated with continuous delivery, we made it the foundation of our TAK2030 strategy document published in April 2023.
 

Powered by Logistics, Command the Outcome

In my time at LMI, I’ve seen many projects and products that reflect exactly these principles across the military logistics enterprise. There are deep and intrinsic ties between the current state and future arc of digital solution continuous delivery and the practice of military logistics, and it’s that deeply rooted synchronicity that motivates me here.

For organizations aiming to streamline operations and scale efficiently, LMI offers technology solutions shaped from deep logistics expertise. Our innate understanding of movement and flow enables us to cut through complexity, setting the stage for continuous delivery and next-generation technologies that drive meaningful impact.

By integrating continuous delivery with gen AI, you can operate faster, make smarter decisions, and adapt in real-time. This results in accelerated deployment and solutions that evolve with your mission needs—ensuring you remain responsive and effective in a rapidly changing environment.

Perhaps you are a career logistician or supply chain expert, but you wouldn’t claim to be a career technologist. Check this out, though – you already understand the one essential component of modern and future IT systems, Continuous Delivery!

While the infantry, cavalry, and armor divisions are the units that physically deliver victory, the notion of victory is moot without sound logistics and supply chain foundations. In the Age of AI, a continuous delivery mindset drives both digital solutions and military logistics. The solution providers who solve for delivery – digital and physical – are the professionals who create enduring military advantage.

The future of combat operations hinges on whether militaries can master the continuous delivery of beans, bullets, bandages, and bytes. Let’s build that future together!

What comes next is already underway at LMI. Explore the field and see what's ready to deploy: lmisolutions.com.