US Navy publishes its tech wish list for the years ahead

Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer, has spent the last three and a half years trying to make the U.S. Navy easier to do business with — shifting away from an old, fragmented patchwork of entry points for startups toward a funnel that pulls companies with strong results into the Navy’s technology base as enterprise services.

This week, Fanelli shared an updated list of the technology areas the Navy is prioritizing over the next several years, issued jointly by his office and the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Mission Systems. Unlike an earlier version, this one was vetted by a handful of unnamed venture investors before release — a step Fanelli said reflects how much the Navy’s earlier public list already shaped how investors think about its buying plans.

The Navy spends “in the $150 billion range every year,” Fanelli said, though most of that flows through traditional procurement channels rather than direct equity investment or co-investment alongside private capital. Recent purchases illustrate the shift toward buying from more mature companies: a $562 million contract awarded this month for the MQ-25 Stingray, an autonomous refueling drone that extends the range of manned fighter jets flying off carriers; edge-compute hardware from Armada, described as shipping containers packed with servers for ship or remote deployment; inspection work handed to Gecko Robotics; a machine-learning pipeline now run by Domino Data Lab; and a swap of a defense contractor’s delayed shipboard camera system for commercial cameras paired with Applied Intuition software, cutting roughly four years off the timeline and expanding to more ships than expected.

The updated list breaks into five categories: applied AI (machine learning and agentic software for sensor fusion, targeting support, autonomous behavior, and software-based cyber operations); quantum information science (applying quantum or quantum-adjacent techniques to navigation, secure communication, and cryptography, rather than owning quantum hardware); advanced networking (moving data securely across degraded or intermittent connections, from ships at sea to coalition partners); electromagnetic spectrum operations (sensing and adapting to the spectrum in contested conditions); and digital engineering and interoperability (open APIs, model-based systems engineering, and zero-trust architecture that let Navy systems talk to each other without custom integration work).

The memo notes none of the categories is a funding commitment, ranks no individual programs, and will change based on emergent, near-term, and long-term needs.

Why it matters

By vetting its priorities list with investors before release, the Navy is signaling it wants private capital to fund early-stage bets on its behalf — a shift that could steer defense-tech investment dollars toward the specific categories the Navy names.