Justin Fanelli
CTO, Department of the Navy
“Our teams’ biggest recent achievement is hard to pin down because so much has changed for the better,” said Justin Fanelli.
His team’s pilot, Flank Speed Wireless, recently won the Defense Department award for Flexibility in Acquisition and is already scaling across several ships. The solution provides secure, high-speed cloud connectivity to sailors on deployed vessels.
This solution is following in the footsteps of STtNG, which was led by another maverick and scaled rapidly, Fanelli said — similar to projects Maven Afloat and Team America.
On the enterprise side, the Zero Trust and Naval Exchange Points teams just won the DOW CIO award for
speed and impact for warfighters.
“There are tidal waves of software-defined warfare in the Innovation Adoption Kit pipeline, but I’d say the number of unleashed folks right now and the sea change overall will be the gift that keeps on giving,” Fanelli said.
Why Watch
In 2026, Fanelli and his team are heavily focused on getting as many positively disruptive wins through this fiscal year as humanly possible.
“Forrester called the Department of the Navy the best Technology Strategy Impact organization in North America in 2025, when they awarded that to our team over impressive corporate giants like Verizon and CBRE; I think we can double or triple down on execution and results will grow,” Fanelli said.
Fanelli and his team are also focusing on “simplicity-consolidation-divestment” on the optimize hand, and on the increased capability hand of Applied AI, manufacturing, C5ISRT, Contested Logistics and the reusable connective tissue that all of that binds.
“The biggest wins come from bringing the two hands together,” Fanelli said.
He’s also personally excited to see his team’s investment horizons, outcome-driven metrics and other tools showing up at SOCOM, the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community and industry partners.
“We hosted a Commercial Bootcamp back in December on the difference between the old way and new way, and it’s heartening to watch the new way spread,” Fanelli said.