The US Navy just told us what’s on its tech wish list for the next several years

美国海军刚刚公布了未来几年的技术愿望清单

Justin Fanelli, the Department of 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. When we first talked to him last year, he described a shift away from what he called “your granddaddy’s government” — a “spaghetti chart” of entry points for startups — into something closer to a funnel, where companies that show strong results get pulled into the Navy’s technology base as enterprise services. 美国海军部首席技术官贾斯汀·法内利（Justin Fanelli）在过去三年半的时间里，一直致力于让美国海军的业务往来变得更加便捷。去年我们首次采访他时，他描述了一种转变：摆脱他所谓的“老派政府”模式——即初创企业面对的错综复杂的“意大利面条式”准入流程——转而采用一种更接近漏斗的机制，让表现出色的公司能够作为企业服务被纳入海军的技术体系中。

This week, we caught up with him again on a video call, and this time, he wasn’t just looking again to further streamline the procurement process, he was sprinting, literally, to catch a flight he’d just been ordered onto with no destination shared. “You have an hour and 15 minutes to get on a plane,” Fanelli said, recounting what he’d just been told, speaking into his phone as he walked, the sun shining behind him. “I’m like, ‘Where?’ Oh my God! And they were like, ‘We’ll figure [the logistics], we’ll tell you as you get there.’ And I’m like, ‘For more than overnight?’ And they were like, ‘Yes.’” As he was walking to his car, he was still unsure what he’d packed for or where he was headed. “I will figure that out in the next 20 minutes,” he said, sounding excited about the adventure ahead. 本周，我们再次通过视频通话采访了他。这一次，他不仅是在寻求进一步简化采购流程，而且还在“冲刺”——字面意义上的冲刺——去赶一趟他刚刚接到命令、但目的地未知的航班。“你有一个小时15分钟的时间去登机，”法内利在边走边对着手机说话时复述了刚刚接到的指令，阳光在他身后闪耀。“我问：‘去哪儿？’天哪！他们说：‘我们会处理好（后勤），等你到了就知道了。’我问：‘是要待超过一晚吗？’他们回答：‘是的。’”当他走向汽车时，他仍然不确定自己带了什么行李，也不知道要去哪里。“我会在接下来的20分钟内搞清楚，”他说道，听起来对即将到来的冒险感到兴奋。

Fanelli reached out because the “demand signal” he sent to investors last year had only grown, and it was making an impact, he said. When the Navy first published its longer-term technology priorities, investors told him it changed how they thought about the Navy’s buying plans, which is part of why he’s doing it again — sharing a fresh list of what the Navy wants to buy in the next several years, this time vetted by a handful of (unnamed) venture investors before release. 法内利之所以联系我们，是因为他去年向投资者发出的“需求信号”不仅在增强，而且已经产生了影响。当海军首次发布其长期技术优先事项时，投资者告诉他，这改变了他们对海军采购计划的看法。这也是他再次发布清单的部分原因——分享一份海军未来几年想要购买的新清单，且这次在发布前还经过了几位（未具名）风险投资人的审核。

How much money the Navy actually puts to work each year depends on what counts as spending, Fanelli said. “We spend in the $150 billion range every year,” he said, though he was careful to separate that number — total Navy purchasing — from something narrower, like direct equity investment. Indeed, while most of that spending still flows through traditional channels, Fanelli said the Navy is trying to inch further toward what he calls co-investment — putting money behind companies alongside private capital rather than writing a check to an established prime contractor. 法内利表示，海军每年实际投入的资金数额取决于如何定义“支出”。“我们每年的支出在1500亿美元左右，”他说。但他谨慎地将这个数字（海军总采购额）与更狭义的领域（如直接股权投资）区分开来。事实上，虽然大部分支出仍通过传统渠道流出，但法内利表示，海军正试图进一步向他所谓的“共同投资”靠拢——即与私人资本一起支持公司，而不是直接向老牌主承包商开支票。

Taking an equity stake, he said, is the most aggressive version of that and remains rare. More often, co-investment means the Navy waits for companies to mature a product on their own before buying it, rather than funding early research itself. The stage of company the Navy buys from has shifted, too. “We mostly buy Series D through F type companies,” Fanelli said, adding that the Navy used to fund its own early-stage research to cover the seed-through-Series-B gap. It’s trying to hand that job to commercial investors instead, which is part of why the priorities document exists at all. “The cost of that, or the responsibility, is for us, if we’re not going to do it ourselves, to cast a cleaner signal,” he said. 他说，持有股权是其中最激进的形式，目前仍然很少见。更多时候，共同投资意味着海军会等待公司自行将产品成熟后再进行购买，而不是亲自资助早期研究。海军采购的公司阶段也发生了变化。“我们主要购买D轮到F轮阶段的公司，”法内利说。他补充道，海军过去常资助自己的早期研究，以填补种子轮到B轮之间的空白。现在，海军正试图将这项工作交给商业投资者，这也是这份优先事项文件存在的意义所在。“如果我们不打算自己做，那么我们的成本或责任，就是发出一个更清晰的信号，”他说。

As for recent purchases, Fanelli — a former Air Force cadet whose career has spanned roles across defense, intelligence, DARPA, and open source initiatives — rattled off a handful. A contract worth $562 million was awarded this month for the MQ-25 Stingray, an autonomous refueling drone that extends the range of manned fighter jets flying off carriers. The Navy has also been buying edge compute hardware from Armada, described loosely as shipping containers packed with servers meant for ship or remote deployment. It brought in Gecko Robotics to handle inspection work that used to be done manually and dangerously; Fanelli said the move drew little pushback because almost nobody wanted that job in the first place. Domino Data Lab is now running the Navy’s machine learning pipeline. And in a case Fanelli seemed to particularly enjoy sharing, the Navy swapped a defense contractor’s years-delayed shipboard camera system for commercial cameras paired with software from Applied Intuition, cutting roughly four years off the timeline and expanding to more ships than expected. 关于近期的采购，法内利——这位曾任空军学员，职业生涯横跨国防、情报、DARPA和开源倡议的前官员——列举了几个例子。本月，海军授予了MQ-25“黄貂鱼”无人机一份价值5.62亿美元的合同，这是一种能够延长航母舰载战斗机航程的自主加油无人机。海军还一直在从Armada购买边缘计算硬件，这可以粗略地描述为装满服务器的集装箱，用于舰船或远程部署。海军还引入了Gecko Robotics来处理过去需要人工且危险的检查工作；法内利说，这一举措几乎没有遭到反对，因为起初根本没人想做那份工作。Domino Data Lab目前正在运行海军的机器学习流水线。在法内利特别喜欢分享的一个案例中，海军用Applied Intuition的软件配合商用摄像头，替换了一家国防承包商延期多年的舰载摄像头系统，将时间缩短了约四年，并扩展到了比预期更多的舰船上。

Given the Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint this year — tanker strikes, a seized vessel, ceasefires that have broken down over shipping-route disputes — it seemed worth asking whether any of that commercial technology is showing up there now. Fanelli was cautious. “I often don’t know what’s classified and unclassified because I’m normally talking to people with clearances,” he said, adding that he’d have to check. (We’ll let you know if he gets back to us.) 鉴于霍尔木兹海峡今年一直是热点地区——油轮遇袭、船只被扣押、因航线纠纷导致停火协议破裂——询问这些商业技术是否已在那里应用似乎很有必要。法内利对此很谨慎。“我通常不知道什么是机密，什么是非机密，因为我平时交流的对象都是有安全许可的人，”他说，并补充称他需要核实一下。（如果他回复我们，我们会告知大家。）

Interestingly, not many people sign off on a purchase like that, according to Fanelli. Buying decisions run through what he called a source selection committee, a small group rather than the sprawling review process outsiders might picture. He described the goal as keeping the process merit-based rather than adding layers of approval. He didn’t get into why technologies typically fail once they’re inside the Navy — he’d arrived at his car and needed to figure out next steps for travel. But when we talked last year, Fanelli explained that the most common reason promising technologies fail isn’t technical, but rather budgetary. The Navy runs on long planning cycles, and a new tool only sticks around if it replaces or “turns off” something the Navy is already paying for. 有趣的是，据法内利称，这类采购的审批人并不多。采购决策由他所谓的“来源选择委员会”负责，这是一个小团队，而不是外人想象中那种庞大的审查流程。他将目标描述为保持流程基于价值，而不是增加审批层级。他没有深入探讨为什么技术进入海军后通常会失败——因为他已经到达车旁，需要处理接下来的行程。但在去年我们交谈时，法内利解释说，有前景的技术失败的最常见原因不是技术问题，而是预算问题。海军的规划周期很长，一项新工具只有在能够替代或“关停”海军已经在付费的项目时，才能留存下来。

Either way, before we parted ways, Fanelli shared an updated internal list of the technology areas the Navy is prioritizing, jointly issued by his office and the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Mission Systems. It breaks down into five broad categories, for those of you either developing or funding defense tech. The first is applied AI, covering machine learning and increasingly agentic software meant to turn raw data into decisions — sensor fusion, targeting support, autonomous behavior, and cyber operations built on software rather than hardware. Quantum information science comes second, focused less on 无论如何，在告别之前，法内利分享了一份海军优先考虑的技术领域更新内部清单，该清单由他的办公室和任务系统组合采购主管联合发布。对于那些正在开发或资助国防技术的读者，这份清单分为五大类。第一类是应用人工智能，涵盖机器学习和日益智能化的代理软件，旨在将原始数据转化为决策——包括传感器融合、目标定位支持、自主行为以及基于软件而非硬件的网络作战。量子信息科学位列第二，其重点不在于……