If you’re a regular reader of Tectonic, you’ll know that the Navy is majorly changing the way it does things. There’s the Trump administration and SecNav Phelan’s focus on amping up shipbuilding, the push to amp up capabilities by 2027, and—just last week—the introduction of the Naval Rapid Capabilities Office. And that’s just the beginning, it seems.
One of the people at the center of this all is Justin Fanelli, the Navy’s Chief Technology Officer and Technical Director of PEO Digital and Enterprise Services. Since stepping into the (still relatively new) CTO role two and a half years ago, Fanelli has been pushing the Navy toward what he calls a faster, more adaptive, more digital future.
That’s meant pushing for everything from quicker acquisition timelines to adoption of unmanned vessels, AI, and edge computing. Plus, he’s been big on commercial companies and technology, as well as bringing sailors and marines into the requirements and development process.
Tectonic sat down with Fanelli last month to talk about his time as CTO of the Navy, his view on nontraditional defense tech companies and commercial tech, the biggest threats facing the US maritime fleet, the balance between manned and unmanned, and what the future of the service looks like.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tectonic Defense: Welcome, Justin. Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.
Justin Fanelli: I am the chief technology officer (CTO) of the Department of the Navy and the technical director of the Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services.
Tell me a little more about what that is.
I wear two hats. Dual hatting is a great way for teams to get more done—though these two are pretty related. I’ve had the CTO job for two and a half years. It wasn’t around much longer than that. We had an awesome person in there before me, and again, it’s a relatively new role in defense. We now have CTOs at the Department of the Navy, including the Marine Corps, Air Force, including Space Force, and Army.
That role involves three factors. One is scouting—signaling to the tech community, to investors, to everyone who can feed the pipeline. The second is pulling across our program executive offices and other organizations that deliver tech, specifically commercial. And the third is facilitation and connecting dots. How do we integrate different pieces? What should be shared services versus unique capabilities? How do we coordinate across interdependent organizations? How can we influence the future so it’s not just a carbon copy or linear improvement from the past?
Then there’s the other job—tech director of a program executive office. There are 17 PEOs within the Department of the Navy. This is the one that converted a few years ago to portfolios—so from program offices to outcomes as a service; from a program mentality into a portfolio mindset and agile release trains, covering ops, cyber, cloud, infrastructure, end user, and a few more.
As the tech director, we’ve gone wildcat on commercial piloting. We’ve amplified the amount of piloting we do and how we bring new companies in. A recent brag point—across the Department of the Navy, for over a decade, the number of partners we worked with was trending downward. It’s now going up. We’re actually increasing the number of partner players on the field and trying to be a better, easier organization to work with and deliver outcomes with and for. This Secretary has us open for business and is unleashing big-ticket increases in value.
I want to ask about the document you mentioned before we started recording—Adaptive Roadmaps.
Adaptive Roadmaps [signed in July] is part of our AC/DC series—Accelerating Change Design Concepts. The premise: Some people can go much faster than others—they’ve proven it. We want to share, perpetuate, and fan the flames of those [in the Navy] who can go faster and better. If you are a winner who wants to be unleashed and accomplish more, there is a set of behaviors that are working, and we want to highlight those.
There are people in the Department who want to deliver faster, better outcomes for warfighters; who are particularly data‑driven; who believe we can be significantly—not just incrementally—better; who are willing to pilot, gather feedback, kill if it’s not working, and improve delivery differently—this is for them.
The first AC/DC was WAMs—our outcome‑driven metrics. How do you measure if you’re making a difference? How do you make more‑informed trade‑offs? There have been several since. This most recent one—Adaptive Roadmaps—tackles moving beyond buzzword‑level “agility.” We have a handful of people delivering and performing at a significantly higher level than their peers. We want to share best practices and show how that can be duplicated and spread, now.
Adaptive roadmaps ask: How do we decrease the cycle time of getting capability out to the fleet, revising it, and making both the capability and user more adaptive? It means involving commercial industry earlier; divestment (turning things off so we can bring in newer solutions, not waiting three years every time we have a good idea); and letting users tell us what they need through tech‑informed concepts of employment. Instead of a long process ending with delivery, we’re doing collaborative co‑creation with Sailors and Marines in the loop.
What does the future of the Navy look like to you, and how soon can we get there?
The future of the Navy is faster, more iterative, more adaptive, more digital. It means measuring software cycle time as well as hardware cycle time. How ready do we want to be for software-defined warfare? We know what much better looks like. It includes a portfolio mindset that says: we want more hulls in the water—so what are all the ways to do that? Does that include improving existing shipyards? Yes. New shipyards? Likely. Public‑private partnerships? Absolutely.
The future of the Navy, in my view, is unleashing public‑private partnerships for the greatest outcomes. We don’t want to over‑define it—we want to listen harder, measure impact, and show quarter‑over‑quarter and year‑over‑year significant improvements in capability, resilience, adaptability, user experience, and value for warfighters.
Talk to me a little more about what “impact” means. How do you measure efficacy?
How quickly can we improve what we’re doing? If we have one method to respond to Red Sea strikes, how many courses of action are available to us? It’s about optionality—giving combatant commanders and fleet commanders more effective ways to deliver. That involves resilience operationally, different configurations for mission threads, hedging optionality between unmanned and manned, and feeding all those inputs into wargaming for commanders.
Talk to me a bit more about the kind of tech you see providing that optionality. You released the priority tech areas for the Department of the Navy—walk me through the most promising stuff.
The acquisition community prescribing what a warfighter needs is backwards. A big component is listening to the demand signal. Another is listening to the commercial industry, where many defense‑tech founders are former junior officers building what they wished they’d had.
Before talking specifics, the goal is to identify current solutions or gaps, and then ask: how much better can this be? “Better” means higher value, faster readiness, fewer manual processes. Wherever Sailors and Marines are hurting most—that’s the biggest opportunity.
Optimization is the other side: when one new capability allows divestment of multiple existing ones, removing pain and friction. Instead of us identifying the problem and building, we’re identifying, listening, surveying a maturing market, and putting solutions in Sailors’ and Marines’ hands to pilot earlier.
Example: bandwidth on ships. For years, people complained. We stood up the STTNG program, enabling port balancing between MILSAT and commercial SATCOM. Paired with Flank Speed wireless and edge compute, this spread quickly. It alleviated pain points, and sailors saw results in weeks and months.
What excites me most is targeting pain and completely changing what’s available. EW is hugely promising—expanding spectrum optionality. Edge AI is another—we’ve been buying cloud for 18 years, but edge compute spend is still small. That will grow much faster than the cloud did. AI at the edge can take overhead away, freeing people for the mission.
A decade ago, when I first implemented AI, people thought it would upset the apple cart. But officers told me, “Oh, you mean we can focus on our jobs instead of updating spreadsheets? We love this.” Human‑machine teaming at enterprise and edge levels—prioritizing higher‑impact actions for those in uniform—that’s where I see impact. We are doing some of this in the surface Navy; we have hitters working this hard in aviation. Tides are either turning or nearly ready to.
I was going to ask about building the hybrid fleet. Given competition with China, 2027 timelines, and a boom in USVs and UUVs—how do you think about that future, and how are you working to build it?
Competition can be such a beautiful thing. Within our commercial ecosystem, more builders are entering, trying creative methods for building processes and unmanned products—different sizes, different approaches. From a portfolio perspective, we’re improving fast in how we get over the hump with the general forces and hedges. We need improved readiness and maintenance, new building, and hybrid approaches: traditional shipbuilders, greenfield shipyards, modernized yards, and unmanned missions. You want this mix feeding into exercises and simulations.
Digital twins are our best friend. If people sometimes call ships floating hotels with missiles, unmanned ships are floating data centers with missiles. We need to play that out operationally, not just in design. We’re calling hard on industry, getting teams competing with different approaches—and our Sailors and Marines providing feedback. That feedback loop will shape the future.
How do you strike a balance between legacy manned ships versus new USVs?
It’s smart to amp up both and figure out what scales. We don’t want to predetermine solutions. Bias toward action on both sides, and data to inform the future. Sea power is exactly as important as you think. What it looks like will come from reps, building, exercises, adaptation, and funneling lessons into the adaptive roadmap of sprints.
What are the biggest maritime threats facing the U.S., and how is the Navy working to address them?
Hard to answer without getting into classified. But: cyberattacks and resilience—covering more ground. And identifying the highest‑impact use cases for autonomous.
What major challenges remain to getting non‑traditional companies through the door at the Department of the Navy?
We’re good at exquisite; there’s a need for speed there. On the commercial side, acquisition risk is seen as higher. But there’s a difference between operational risk and acquisition risk. Optimizing for your team or site locally usually isn’t what’s highest value for our warfighters. Some acquisition folks are tigers in cages—and the cage is gone.
We need more of the community to embrace being measured by outcomes instead of the sub-activities from both defense‑tech companies and traditional players. Meritocracy, not comfort. The impediment now is catching what’s working—this is the goal of AC/DC. We need to unleash more people who can move faster, work with Sailors and Marines, and think flexibly. This is why we’ve moved to enterprise services. This is why new approaches with higher projected impact will scale faster than before – Flankspeed edge and wireless, ashore and afloat telemetry scaled, SAILS. The USMC Digital Transformation Teams, the Navy’s data scientists at sea, and the Rapid Capabilities Office are hunting big wins and scaling what’s working.
What is the defense‑tech community still getting wrong?
They need to understand our ecosystem and programs well enough to show where they can peel something out and prove they’re better. Coming with an offering that doesn’t divest anything or map to our portfolios is the slowest way. If they say: “This accomplishes these mission threads faster, saves money by Day 20, and we can pilot and divest old tools”—that works. If they say, “We have a cool new UX,” that doesn’t. They need to be full dance partners in modernization.
Are acquisition reforms being pushed by Congress, the DoD, and the administration enough to change how things are done? Or does more need to be done?
Where acquisitions pair with operations and want to move faster, it works. We have the tools and authorities. Winners are winning bigger; it’s non-linear.
The main question has been: how do we scale pockets of excellence? We put out the Innovation Adoption Kit to make it more approachable. We have online intake so partners can show differential value and people can reach out to me and my staff, and many have—we’re growing a community playing to win. There’s always room for more reform, but we’ve been given sufficient unleashing. Now it’s about getting enough adopters.
Final question: Are there risks in moving toward more non‑traditional defense companies and away from primes?
It’s not about moving away—it’s about meritocracy. Measure outcomes, not comfort. Test differently, pull users in differently, evaluate clearer trade‑offs. Don’t just buy new stuff without portfolio fit. Optimize for impact. Get everyone speaking a similar language—SOCOM did this well with Sonic Spear. We’re working with the Coast Guard in a shared maritime language across Services—that’s new. More alignment means amplified effects.
Yes, there are risks. But with data, alignment, and eyes open, we can mitigate risks while increasing optionality.
Any closing thoughts?
At dinner last night, with builders, appointees, and people in uniform, there was a consensus: This is the greatest opportunity for impact any of us has ever had. It’s going to require more grinding and more work than most are used to. One of the big impediments is who’s willing to operate differently, adapt faster, and work harder to push this surge over the hump.