The U.S. Navy is narrowing its technology priorities and streamlining its acquisition strategy, according to Acting Navy Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Justin Fanelli who said this week that the service is prioritizing efforts to streamline technology acquisition and accelerate delivery of cutting-edge capabilities as it seeks to keep pace with commercial innovation and growing global threats.
Speaking at the Defense News Conference on Sept. 3, Fanelli emphasized the Navy’s focus on five priority technology areas – artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, cyber capabilities, directed energy, and hypersonics – as part of a broader strategy to reduce development timelines and eliminate barriers to fielding new systems.
Fanelli said the technology priorities were designed to make those priorities more explicit.
“In general, programs of record take between 17 and 27 years to field as of last year,” Fanelli said. “We want that to be faster. We want that to be more commercial first … What can we do to both ready the garden and pull things through that are winners?”
Fanelli also emphasized how the Navy is using an “investment horizons model” to better organize and manage its technology portfolio.
The strategy divides technologies into four categories – Evaluating, Emerging, Investing, and Retiring – and is intended to accelerate the adoption of promising capabilities while retiring outdated systems more efficiently. Fanelli said the horizons approach is designed to accelerate technology adoption while managing the risks that come with innovation.
“This is a situation where we’re leveraging instead of inventing,” he said. “The Department of Defense (DOD) traditionally has a little bit of fear of success … What if this works too well? What if this is a runaway train and everyone’s on it? Will it break from an engineering perspective? Will it break from a budget perspective? That is the psychological safety, or just encapsulation, of horizon.”
Fanelli pointed to generative AI as a recent example of how the Navy is using a measured, flexible approach to experimentation and scaling.
“We looked at a few different pockets of excellence,” he said. “We’re going to not cap them but just monitor the use … see what’s working best, make that more of a competition, and then just scale what’s working the absolute best. It’s not your baby anymore. It’s what is the highest value.”
Fanelli noted that the Navy’s efforts to streamline acquisition and focus its technology investments align closely with the broader direction recently set by DOD CTO Michael Emil, who has called for refining and narrowing the DOD’s overarching approach to defining and prioritizing emerging technologies.
The DOD’s Critical Technology Areas list was originally created to attract and scale private capital in support of national defense priorities. The list includes 14 key areas, including biotechnology, quantum science, trusted AI and autonomy, microelectronics, space technology, hypersonics, and cyber. But unlike his predecessors, Michael plans to narrow the list rather than expand it, aiming to sharpen focus and improve alignment across the department.
“Michael said, ‘Hey, 14 is a pretty hard number to remember,’” Fanelli recalled. “The idea of narrowing our focus and making progress on a few things was the goal there – and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. The Navy’s approach fits right into that larger DOD strategy.”