Navy CTO discusses accelerating tech adoption and industry partnerships

All right, folks, we are now going to continue our discussion on the general space of emerging technologies and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific with the Navy's Chief Technology Officer, Justin Finnelli, who is here, along with C4ISRNet's Space and Emerging Technology Reporter, Courtney Alban

Please welcome them both to the stage. Well, Justin, it's great to have you here today. Thanks for joining us

I thought maybe we could start out talking a little bit about your role in the Navy's chief technology office

but also you have a dual-hatted role as a technical lead in one of the Navy's program executive offices

Can you talk a little bit about what you do, what your focus is, and just a little bit about your job there

Sure. So I always jump into my role, mostly because I think that's what people are interested in

But it occurs to me that talking about some of the background in a moment is more important than usual

So I'm an electrical engineer because the Air Force chose that for me

I liked STEM, but the fact that they said, hey, here's a need, was incredible foresight for what I ended up doing

So a debt of gratitude there. That has been the best surfboard I could ask for over the last 30 years of here's what hardware is doing, here's what software is doing, and then riding that

And so I guess where that has led me and the government, specifically DOD, but some other places, intelligence agencies, have allowed me to really see how valuable, bless you, the partnerships from a public-private perspective can be

But there have been a lot of times where we just haven't tapped in or scaled that as much as possible

And so trying to get after that and being probably more empowered and enabled than we've ever been, what I see is the tech director role across eight portfolios as one where instead of competing with industry, we're trying to open the door, welcome them, show us what we can do better

So this looks like driving the requirements side of things to be higher level and capability needs statements

This means piloting more things, some where we have an explicit, hey, this is something we haven't been great at

Hey, this is just a gap. And so that tech director role has allowed my teams to get both more in the weeds and then also more integrated with the private sector than I think we had been before

And then the CTO role is like it's the better title, but this is strategy, this is policy, this is connecting dots

And so one of the areas that I think we can build off of or leverage the acquisition community and the tech director work is we want to literally just scale what's working and have a more ready public-private partnership set of tools and opportunities that are ready to go so that we can pull them forward

And so that's kind of been the yin and yang of my last little bit

Great. Well, there's some threads in there that I want to pull throughout our conversation on scaling the empowerment that we're seeing from DOD and pushing through some of the roadblocks and all of that

But I wanted to maybe talk a little bit about a recent list of technology priorities that you released, things like AI, quantum, cyber

Can you give us an idea of kind of, you know, these are priorities we hear from throughout the department

Why are they important for the Navy right now? And what are you doing to help kind of get after progress in those areas

Sure. So Courtney is referring to the PTAs, the priority technology areas

And so historically, what we had done is given a list of

and Honorable Michael, Emil Michael, just I think last week said, hey, 14 is a pretty hard number to remember

The word priority wasn't even plural until the 1930s. It just used to mean one thing

And so the idea of narrowing our focus and making progress on a few things was the goal there

And so we chose five. We actually go down to the third level of here are needs

This is both for industry and investors. And so we use an investment horizons model

It's been around for a little while. This is a situation where we're leveraging instead of inventing

And so we have a kind of horizon three landscape of what's out there

And we combed through that and said, oh, here are areas where either we haven't seen it

or there's just not enough happening. And so the reason that we put that signal out there

and work with USD R&E to kind of cast attention is that we know that our industry partners

are the ones who are pulling the hardest. The last numbers I saw are, it's six to one

the private sector R&D versus government R&D. That used to be 50-50

And so if we are not shining a clearer light on where we want that attention

then it hard to expect the throughput will be where we like it to be This to say we shined five lights and then probably at the Tier 3 level

like 30 mini lights on here's what we really need. In terms of those bearing fruit, I can take you through what's moved

from Horizon 3 to 2 to 1 recently. In general, the latest numbers I saw were programs of record take between 17 and 27 years to field as of last year

We want that to be faster. We want that to be more commercial first, right

And so what can we do to both ready the garden and pull things through that are winners

I was on yesterday with one of the more progressive Army offices who's doing this

And I said, hey, what are your lessons learned? Let's exchange. And it's just really both encouraging and exciting to see how much faster we can pull tech if it's ready to be integrated, if it's interoperable in a smart way, and if it's someone who understands the Defense Department well enough to know that there's some overhead less than there used to be

And if you can specify how this makes a difference for us, then we can get something through

And so all this to say how those are tracking. Those are tracking significantly faster than they were before

And so we're going to double down on what is working. For instance, like the AI activities

Here are the groups that are progressing. This is an interesting one

I'll go to specifics on a use case. So there were places where we were behind on adoption of generative AI

And so we had a few teams that I pulled in from our different system commands and said, hey, why isn't more happening

Well, they don't know what we're allowed to do and not allowed to do. Well, that's a problem

Let's be clearer on this. And so we put out a little bit of guidance and said, hey, let's unleash people to do things

but things are pull commercial in, not try to create our own LLMs

We don't have billions of dollars to throw at that problem. And so from there, we had Mavericks from across the different commands in country

to say, hey, here is something that is a beacon of light

We're excited about this. Hey, let's get people using that. The literal, and this is interesting, I think, for everybody

So everyone's familiar with fear of failure. What if this doesn't work

We traditionally have 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? What happens? And so that is the psychological safety or just encapsulation of Horizon 2

And so for Genitive AI, we looked at here a few different pockets of excellence

We're going to not cap them, but just monitor the use of those, see what's working best

make that more of a competition, and then just scale what's working the absolute best

And so this got this kind of like intentionally integrated two different things

that commercial experimentation faster, fewer limits to getting in the door, but it's not your baby anymore

It's what is the highest value. So the experimentation mindset and the business mindset of scaling

And so that's worked really well with the DepSecDef's office. That's actually worked really well with the coordination across services

And so if we can continue to show those wins, and in fact, at sessions like these, people have come up and said

here's something that's working really well. Oh, give me data so I can tell that story

And if you can turn something off or if we can go to, hey, we are spending more for more value, okay, that's fine

If we are spending less for more value or if we're spending the same but we can turn off other things, like that's where our sweet spot is

And so where folks have provided that type of data, then we can really push, and now we're even designating enterprise services

Okay, so you can align value, resources, prioritization to get after? We have really quantitative people in important seats right now to get after that

It's fewer conversations. It's more numbers. So, yes. Great. Just since we're talking about Indo-Pacific posture, things like that today, can you speak a little bit to kind of how, you know, some of those priorities kind of align with, you know

DoD strategy in the Pacific, the Navy's kind of focus areas in that realm

Yep. Well, there's the Davidson window, and then there's just in general the idea that we can go much, much faster

Right? And so if we're waiting for five years for anything to get delivered, then that's a perpetual – like maybe you could get away with that in the past

That's a perpetual punt that no one wants anymore. And I think there's just a recognition that, yes, we would like as much capability in the next six months, 12 months, 18 months as possible

But then also, let's never go back to waiting 17 to 27 years on average for things

And so let's use this time to stamp in how much better we can be and have all of those examples

And so this to say for Indopaycom we want that garden of capabilities which based on the speed of software and the bounty of AI to replace things that are either legacy systems or manual processes And so there Admiral Baparo has spoke publicly about we want a hellscape of things that we

can throw at a problem. And so we want to provide him and Nindo Paycom an overflowing bushel of options

And so the number of options has grown and will continue to grow if we do this right

Here are all the pieces of the value chain and the kill chain that we can give so that there are more different selections for different use cases, for different mission threads

We just want that overflowing. And that's the Horizon 3 and Horizon 2 so that we pull just the very best into Horizon 1

Where we had only one capability and we were literally one deep and here were the issues with that

You're two or three years away from being able to pull in a valid competitor

I never want that to happen again, right? Competition is what makes this beautiful

And so we have strong companies. We have companies like Palantir and Red Cell Partners and just a lot of AI companies who are coming in and saying

hey, let's have that good, strong competition to show here's how we're doing on adding value

here's what that looks like over cost, here's what that looks like from an interoperability perspective

and what is our time to deliver. Okay. I wanted to ask a little bit about kind of the push that we've seen from senior leaders in DOD

to kind of from within the department to reform, you know, various acquisition and requirements processes

You know, early in the year, we saw Secretary Hegseth's software acquisition pathway memo about streaming, or streamlining, sorry, software acquisition

You know, there was a recent move to eliminate the JASEDS process

And then even this kind of push for drone dominance by, you know, 2027

Can you walk us through a little bit kind of how the Navy is implementing this guidance

how your office is helping to use this empowerment, these authorities from senior leaders to speed up acquisition

And yeah. Yeah. So those are open invitations to the departments and services

so Department of Navy, Navy and Marine Corps. I can talk about our response. But I guess the most interesting part of that is it's an open invitation

to respond as an ecosystem as a whole. And so when we say, hey, the DepSecDev memo on the J-SIDS process, and here's what requirements look like, we have to meet that with an abounding number of wins

I'll tell you a C story. The first time 20 years ago, I sat in a brief on software within, at the highest levels of DoD, software within acquisition

the comment was hey you're this team was over cost over schedule and so I said hey I'm an

engineer with a business background I know what to do let's get some benchmarks and so the next

Monday I called the office who was doing the yelling and I said hey what does great look like

and they said on cost on schedule all this and I said okay which program offices are doing that

right now. I'll call them. And they said, oh, we don't have any. And I was like, we don't have any

And they said, no, but like, here's what we want. And I was like, isn't it

a problem that there aren't any examples of that? We now have examples

of wins. And what's more than that is we are being asked

to, as a community, private and public sector, to come forward with better offerings. And so what the Navy

and Marine Corps are doing is important, but like we want to be overflowed with here are

quantitatively and specifically what can be done with software acquisition pathways. We're still, the way this is still working is like the acquisition team who is used to

in some cases, doing things the old way is learning software acquisition pathways

Where this has gone really well is if industry says, hey, did you know you can use software acquisition pathways for hardware if there's software on it

Yeah. Well, we've thought through, here's where you can get the money

Here's the acquisition strategy that goes faster. Like, using that, we'll get better

And we are getting better. And we're trying to boot camp the folks who are used to doing things an old way

And we've figured out who the hitters are there. But as a whole, you don't have to wait for the Department of Defense and government to get way smarter

If industry is using these tools to say, here's what it used to take

It used to take 18 months. Now we have an example of where it took three

And we have an example of we were really pressed and it took 30 days

That's awesome because then we can use that. And so, like, when we go home from work at 10 or 11 at night, like, we could do research on figuring that out, but if you're bringing those examples, like, that makes things easier

So that's software acquisition pathways and requirements. For each of those, hey, if we have actual leverage of the Army is doing this, the Air Force is doing this, like, so now I have a stack of here are the seven best places where we've used software acquisition pathways

And here are the other places we should do it But there still a discussion in the building with some of the PMs and PEOs on hey is this a good idea I don have people who done this before

And so we need this to be a groundswell of, here's how you think about this progressively with examples

so that we, again, don't have to go back. That's how we get the evergreen garden of options

is you have a comparison and don't... Some people will try to say

here's what perfect looks like, you have to meet this. All you have to do is be better than

or compare yourself to what's being done right now. And so if there is an available benchmark

and you show how much better the option is, we use this for divestments

we use this for A-B testing within piloting, and we use this for acquisition

So if you say, hey, this is, here's how we're using the JSON's replacement

Here's how we're using capability needs statements. Here's where this ties to. That level of specificity

It's not fair, but it's more effective. And so where folks have come with the here's what's more effective and done all of that homework, we can run

Okay. You know, you're talking a little bit about kind of what companies can do to, you know, get after the solution more quickly, bring those ideas to the department

What can the Navy's acquisition offices or program teams do to make it easier for companies to work with them

What does it look like on the other side of that equation? Yeah, totally. So happy to answer any of the specific questions

So we just got a heavy hitter who I see every day who we're really excited about

It's a long one. The Assistant Secretary of Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition, the Principal Military Deputy, the three-star there, Admiral Seiko Acona

She is awesome, right? And so she has made a career of unleashing industry and unleashing mavericks to go do things faster

And so already, like, stood up, the Secretary stood up the Rapid Capabilities Office

It's under her. That's just recent. The idea of coming to us and scaling, potentially, the amount of pilots that we can do both inside and outside the RCO is something that we've already talked about

And so the way the PEO Digital, I know that one most intimately because the tech director there, what we did there was we created a portal, basically a digital on-ramp to say, hey, what is your lean business case

How does what you're offering fit into our portfolios and how can we make use of that

Originally, this was the back story here is kind of interesting. We didn't used to have money for piloting

We did a lot of work. We got money for piloting. And then we said, you know what

I think we can do five pilots. And so we opened up this portal to do side by side

We got 50 entries. That's a good problem. Now we have 1,000 entries and we have money for

and really the limiting factor is number of pilot leads within the government

We have money for and people for like 20 of those. And so we rack and stack those based on value

But where we can make that either less work for the pilot leads, scale that with other PEOs

So now we've shared that with PEO C4I, PEO IWS, PEO MLB

And so that is becoming a pattern. The more pressure there is and examples and obvious wins and divestment opportunities, the more that we can pull that through

So what that looks like to us now is here's exactly how telephone works

If someone says, hey, I want to sit down for a 30 minute meeting. We normally do those on Saturday or Sunday

And they tell us, hey, here's all the great stuff. We either have to relay that to somebody or have another meeting

If we have the side-by-side, here's how much better it is, and here's what you can turn off, we can look at redirecting our FY26 budget to that better opportunity

And so data just moves faster than conversations, and especially at this scale, I think the answer to your question is where we have no-brainer data, we can just put everyone on a Teams thread and show them

Great. Great. Well, unfortunately, it looks like we're up against time. I just wanted to thank you again for being available to speak today

And, yeah, I really appreciate your insights here. Well, thank you guys for what you're doing in this space

It's tremendously important. I can tell you that between the acquisition community and my teams

we look at this as a whole-of-nation type thrust right now. We have more builders

We have more investors. We have more buyers who are willing to work on hard problems

I love that for this set of this moment and this set of problems

Like, this is exactly what we need. So thank you. Thank you for giving us more options than leaning on some countries we don't want to lean on for tech

Thank you for making some of the interdependencies clearer. clearer. Thank you for allowing us to be more modular. We need those way, way better options

so that we can move forward, and we're willing to do that, and you probably have heard from

some Congress people today, we're willing to do that much more iteratively and faster

as long as those are clear-cut decisions that we can make. Great. Thanks again

Great work