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The Daily Scoop Podcast
Navy CTO Justin Fanelli on rewriting the rules of defense acquisition
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The Department of Defense and the unifromed milit…
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Today on the Daily Scoop Podcast from the Scoop News Group, brought to you by Salesforce Navy CTO Justin Finelli on rewriting the Rules of Defense Acquisition. Hear what Finelli had to say at last month's defense Talks. It's Tuesday, January 6, 2025. Welcome to the Daily Scoop Podcast where you'll hear the latest news and trends facing government leaders. I'm the host of the Daily Scoop Podcast, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for joining me. Now let's dive into the day's top headlines. Kirsten Davies has been formally sworn in as Chief Information Officer at the Defense Department, where she'll oversee a broad portfolio of important programs the Pentagon announced just before the new year. Davies took the reins of that CIO role shortly before the Christmas holiday, according to officials, which was less than a week after she was confirmed by the Senate. Officials wrote in a post on the office of the CIO's LinkedIn page, which quote, she brings to the department two decades transforming organizations for the digital age, building cyber defenses, tackling tech debt and innovating at scale. Also noting her private sector experience, which includes top leadership roles for major companies such as Unilever, Estee Lauder Companies, Barclays, Hewlett Packard Enterprises and Siemens ag. Her extensive IT and cybersecurity background was previously touted by experts who wrote a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee in support of her nomination for Pentagon CIO. In social media posts, DoD officials noted that Davies will be serving under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth while leading digital modernization efforts and overseeing for him the information enterprise, cybersecurity, technology innovation and a broad portfolio of national security programs. Davies took the helm from Katie Arrington, who has launched and shepherded major initiatives while performing the duties of DoD CIO in a non Senate confirmed capacity. Arrington was appointed to that position by Hegseth last March, shortly after she returned to the department for another stint as Chief Information Security officer. To what extent Davies will continue, modify, expand or cut existing programs remains to be seen. She previously suggested that she intends to forge a new generation of tech partnerships with industry and embed the building blocks of AI at the department to support US Military efforts to achieve data supremacy and and decision dominance over adversaries. Now, onto other news. The Federal Aviation Administration is taking another step forward in its goal of modernizing systems and processes by picking two partners to help replace more than 600 radars, the agency said. Virginia based RTX and Spanish firm Indra Systemas will come on board the FAA's Air Traffic Control overhaul marked by high stakes, tight timelines and billions of dollars in funding. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an announcement on Monday that most of the agency's radars date back to the 1980s, calling it unacceptable. The radar replacement will kick off this quarter with the finish line of June 2028 as the goal. The contracts will be paid for by the initial funds allocated in the One Big Beautiful bill, which earmarked $12.5 billion for the air traffic control modernization project. The radar overhaul is much needed and critical to ensuring safety and efficiency across, according to DOT officials. FAA Administrator Brian Bedford said in a statement that, quote, many of the units have exceeded their intended service life, making them increasingly expensive to maintain and difficult to support. We are buying radar systems that will bring production back to the US and provide a vital surveillance backbone to the national airspace system, unquote. The two firms are likely to work with FAA's prime integrator, Peraton, which was brought into the fold in December. Air traffic control modernization is underway, including the deployment of digital radio and voice switches, as well as converting copper lines. For more news at the intersection of the federal government and technology, make sure to visit fedscoop.com the Department of Defense and its uniformed military services are undertaking a massive acquisition overhaul, prioritizing speed and rapid innovation. One of the services leading the way on that journey is the Department of the Navy. And last month at Defense Talks, CTO Justin Finelli delivered a dynamic keynote sharing how the sea service is going about its technology enabling acquisition transformation. If you missed that keynote, you're in luck because we have it for you today. And full on the daily scoop. So now let's go to that Defense Talks keynote with Navy CTO Justin Finelli.
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Good morning, family. I guess afternoon. Good afternoon. I'm so happy to be here because number one, I think this is the moment that we've been waiting for. And it's here. And it's here because so many of you guys did what was required to get us here. And then two As I look around the room, I see two things, people who are ready to win bigger and people who want to eat lunch. So let's get my observation is that either in life sectors, people, organizations either bring about their own disruption or they're subjected to it. I see an ecosystem who very much wants to help the national security and economic prosperity of this country flourish in a way that we've never seen before. And I don't know if you've heard, but we're open for boldness and open for business right now. So something hit as a kid Growing up in Pittsburgh, my dad used to say winners have a sense of urgency. We caught that. Right now we are moving faster. There were operational things, there were worldwide things, and then there were just pivots in acquisition tools that have accumulated over time. In general, the number of things that have shifted and come together to allow us to, to have this moment. It's too many to count. But we're here. And this shift from PEOs to PAEs to portfolio acquisition executives can be the cherry on top for ushering that new world of bigger wins in. So let's talk about that. I think this group knows the valley of death for technology better than most. We're over that. So I mentioned I'm from Pittsburgh, city of Pittsburgh, City of Bridges. I think we're in the era of bridges for the things that really matter. Will some things still not make it? Yes, of course. That's how capitalism works. That's how efficiency works. But for the best capabilities that we want to bring forward, we are trying to build and we have proven out bridges to get the best kit to our war fighters faster. One of the ways that we're doing that is, is we are living agilely in a waterfall world. So Alex Miller talked about adapting and adopting. We are now doing strategy through execution. The budgeting process didn't change how we live within it. Our partnership with R and E, and you heard from honorable Michael earlier today, our expansion with Defense Innovation Unit, the way that we are doing pilots into execution, that shift, that's a racetrack now. We are trying to make that as seamless as possible. And there are a number of ways that we're doing that. I'm going to talk to you about them now. We need a standardized, in our opinion, set of plays so that we're not all learning on the fly. It's been art and a pickup game in a lot of ways. We have made this a science. We have the Innovation Adoption Kit out. We partner across the services to say, hey, we. What are the more streamlined, easier ways to execute these things? And so when we think about our horse blanket, our traditional here's what we were doing versus here's what we're doing now, we think about how hard it is to get some capability delivered. We want that to be downhill running. We want that to be streamlined and as efficient as possible. And we've figured that out. In my opinion, we've cracked the nut on almost all of those cases. It's just a matter of sharing the same language, executing together and making sure that outcomes decide our decision making. Now, as I see people from the private sector here who are helping help us, help all of us together by being the people who tee up these wins, these side by side comparisons to show how much more effective the current solution is than the future, than what we have as a baseline. So we'll talk about that. Divest to invest. But over the last year, what we've done to embrace this is to show how much better we can be side by side. And the way that we've done that is by wildcatting. We run more pilots. It's about 20 times more than we used to. And we are either scaling them or killing them. People saw that as risky behavior. We were taking more acquisition risk. Turns out Sec War spoke about this. We are trying to take more acquisition risk in order to lower operational risk. This means playing to win, not playing not to lose. And so as we move down that path, we are prepared to go faster. We've already shown, I have some examples where we're doing this already and I want to talk about the language so that we're all speaking the same language. So instead of the long kind of Rube Goldberg charts, it's a funnel, right? Everyone who's done sales, everyone who's delivered product knows funnels. We want this to be downhill running. This isn't totally new. We adapted this. But this is the idea of we are always scouting. That's Horizon three. We are pulling the best things from scouting into piloting. That's Horizon 2. As we pilot, we either kill fast or, or scale. That's a data question. And then Horizon 1 is production. Horizon 0 is the graveyard of the things we've cattle driven. So as we think about that portfolio and all of the funnel that feeds that portfolio on the end, it doesn't take 17 years to reinvent the portfolio. It shouldn't. It can't. What we're trying to do is say, hey, start looking at what to turn off and divest in Horizon one starting in Horizon three. So looking for divestments, showing how you have outcomes overmatch allows us to get through there faster. What does that result in? It results in enterprise services and divestments. So we don't want 50 DevSecOps environments anymore. We want some that work that are so good, the warfighters say, please never turn this off. And then some things that we turn off because we show the business case isn't there anymore. And doing that on repeat. A couple examples of that are. Anyone know how many cloud instances we have? Whatever it is, triple it. We had the Neptune management office where we said hey, we want less redundancy and more competition. So we awarded to Google and Oracle recently. This is the one stop shop for cloud across Department of Navy and we're coordinating with Dow and we're coordinating with the other services. We need to streamline that so it's more efficient. A second example is we've done a lot of work on the enterprise that it turned out applied with some thinking and some smart operators to the edge. And so our connecting of innovation at the enterprise to the edge to make sure that ship to shore and everything in between is smarter. That includes not just edge compute and the AI, the AI at the edge. It also includes transport innovations and how we're using commercial first and commercial fast. Point is we're not just talking about this. We've already had a series of wins and where people can show it's better and we can divest. We've moved forward. A third example that came up this morning was Genai Mil. So we had a lot of. Well first we had like very few and then we had a lot of different pilots and and then we came through with here is the first enterprise service. We'll turn off some of those pilots. That's a good news story. That means we learned something. The workforce got smarter, we got some experience and then we divested to invest people. Most people hadn't seen that in their career. I started on this project, I retired on this project. Now we're moving at the pace of technology. Right? Like we are trying to be commercial parity and I think we'll see that with a lot more of these projects, not just generative AI. How are we doing that actually using data. We've talked about this today. This is a live dashboard that we use to evaluate pilots. If it is disrupting something, if we can make the case. The problem is when we have to tell that story, it dilutes over telephone. Data is non dilutive. Right. We can pull this, we can go to cape, we can go to the money people and say hey, this is the data we have from our vendor partner. It is having this impact. It's irrefutable. Forrester also thought it was irrefutable when they gave us the North American Award for Tech strategy. So I wanted to recognize the secretary in his first year winning something that a government organization has never won before. This isn't, I think runner up was Verizon and cbre. Our co winners in other categories were bank of America and others. So point is we're making waves. We'll continue to make waves with our users. The adaptive Roadmaps piece Modern Service Delivery 3.0 on how to do MOSA is the next add into the Innovation Adoption kit. And I just want to leave you with this. Every ship in this picture has new tech that wasn't on there a year ago from pilots that we scaled. Those are different ship classes, Those are different CSOs, those are different folks. And so we are serious and we are moving quicker than we have before and it's based on outcomes and you so the call to action is let's share a language, bring wins, send them to us quantitatively. Not this could be a win, we want those too, but the actual wins and then send more winners because we need more poll pullers in the department who can make those trade offs. This is to me the best era we've seen in my 27 years. Thank you for making it to this point. Now let's up the ante.
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For more on acquisition reform across the federal government, make sure to visit fedscoop.com Also in today's episode, Salesforce Executive Vice President of Global Public Sector Paul Tatum joins S and G host Wyatt Cash in a sponsored podcast discussion on the evolution and implementation of of agentic AI in the federal government.
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Welcome to our special series on agentic AI for government brought to you by Salesforce. Artificial intelligence is evolving at a breathtaking speed, presenting revolutionary opportunities to civilian and defense agencies. And one area ripe for leveraging AI energetic applications is is continuing efforts to modernize national security systems and processes. Given the increasing volume and speed and complexity of national security threats, it's essential for national security leaders to capitalize on the power of agentic AI to help humans streamline workflows, eliminate bottlenecks, and improve operational readiness. I'm Wyatt Cash with Scoop News Group and here to talk about the emerging use cases for agentic AI to modernize national security is Paul Tatum, Executive Vice President, Global Public Sector at Salesforce. Paul, thank you so much for joining joining us and welcome.
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D
Thank you Wyatt. It's great to be here today and good to see you again.
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C
So let me start by framing this first question. You know, Salesforce has been making a lot of recent investments in its public sector business. Can you tell us a little bit why Salesforce is doubling down on its work with the government and why now?
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D
You know Wyatt, we have been supporting our amazing government customers for over 20 years and we're very excited to continue to make that investment, increase that investment. In fact, just this summer we announced A number of our AI products, agent force and data cloud, our marketing cloud, our tableau next capabilities, going through the FedRAMP high authorization, all of those to bring even more capabilities to our U.S. government customers. And at the end of the day, I've been doing this for over 30 years, working with these amazing organizations and civil servants. And I think we all know that they have a lot of work on their. On their plate. Their mission is very important. And if we as a company at Salesforce can bring them the very best technologies and capabilities to enhance their mission, to make their reach out to their customers, who is the Americans that they serve, we want to do that. You know, at Salesforce, for from day one, we've always believed in putting our customers at the center of everything that we do. And our government wants to do the same thing with you, Wyatt, and with me to put us in the center to provide services and the Salesforce platform and the things that we brought to government are helping them do that.
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C
Well, one of the announcements that I saw recently that generated a lot of attention back in September, particularly in government, was the announcement of Mission Force. A lot of us might be familiar with Salesforce in the federal, state and local space, but aren't as dialed in on what Salesforce is doing in defense and national security. So very interested to talk to you a little bit more about that today. Can you tell us about Salesforce's background and work with these agencies in particular and kind of what the role of Mission Force is all about?
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D
Yeah. We were so excited to make that announcement in September announcing the Mission Force initiative. And although we've been working with our defense partners very closely for many years, Department of Army, Air Force, Navy and all kinds of use cases, we want to bring to the Department of War and our defense partners the very best of what industry has to offer. As you say, said in your introductory comments, the threats and the velocity of things going on, on in the world out there requires the very best technology for our defense partners. And so Mission Force is all about that. The whole company is rallying around bringing the very best of Salesforce to bring velocity to our commercial products, to bring them into that part of the industry to make sure we understand their use cases, that we can partner with them very closely. As they look at Salesforce and say, wow, that's an amazing technology. When and how can we have that and how can we leverage that? Mission Force is helping us do that. So it's bringing acceleration, focus and execution for everything that our defense partners need across the board, whether it be in the kind of, the lower, you know, kind of use cases at IL4 and Aisle 5 all the way up to top secret.
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C
And then more specifically, what is the new vision with Mission Force and what can defense and intelligence leaders expect?
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D
So what we're doing with Missionforce and at Salesforce at large for our government customers, if you think about you mentioned, you know, people that are listening may be familiar with Salesforce helping in the federal market or state and local. And in some ways our defense work is very similar. There are lots of use cases around personnel, around recruiting that we're very active in and making a big impact on behalf of those organizations in defense. So those will continue. But when we look forward and what we hear from the Pentagon and from leadership within the defense of Department of War is Salesforce. We need help with logistics, we need help with different parts of our operation that we see Salesforce as doing. CRM, customer relationship management, doing case management, doing digital communication and collaboration. Those are things we want to bring all the way to the warfighter. And so Mission Force is helping us do that. So it's taking all of those capabilities that we have had for many, many years and fine tuning them for the Department of War. Now you mentioned agentic AI. We can't leave this little discussion without mentioning Agent Force and the work that we're doing with agentic AI. And what's really, really impressive and incredible about this technology is, you know, what we're seeing Agent Force do is it can now take action, you know, inside of the workflows. It can learn, it can adapt, it can reason and it can navigate. And when you look at what our defense customers are trying to do, they need those agentic technologies to really enhance the pace, the velocity, the accuracy of their mission. And so we're bringing the very best of Agent Force. We're bringing the very best of our integration technologies like Data 360 Informatica, which is now part of our portfolio, mulesoft all of it together to really enhance and accelerate their mission success.
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C
So Paul, can you provide maybe some practical examples of where AI and particularly agentic AI is making like a material difference in, in advancing national security work and maybe what are some examples of some low hanging fruit that these agencies can already start to work with?
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D
Well, the incredible thing about our government customers and what I love about them is the clarity of their mission. There's a lot of organizations that are big, they have been in place for a long time, but the fact is that they're very clear on what they need to do. Much of it is documented, much of it is well understood processes. But what our defense customers want to do is, hey, can we get out of the mundane things so that we can really focus on the mission critical things. And there's a lot of mundane things in the Department of War and in the overall operations of things at the Pentagon. And so the first thing we do with Agent Force and gentic AI is how do we help? I would say that soldier, that war fighter, that person in the department, work through the backlog of work. And so what we see very specifically with Agent Force is helping with recruiting, helping with case management, reaching out to constituents and ensuring forms are filled out correctly, the right documentation has been included that the right policy and regulations are being followed. So these are all things that have typically required a lot of human oversight and involvement. And going forward, those are the things that are very easy for agentic technology like Agent Force to handle. And you free up, you know, these very valuable personnel to go take care of much more strategic and impactful parts of the mission stack. So we'll start at the bottom, you know, of that stack and the workloads and the workflows and then continue to iterate and mature the technology farther into the mission operations.
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C
So, Paul, next I'd like to ask, one of the big issues I think is around readiness. So can you talk a little bit about our national security agencies ready to adopt agentic AI today. And if not, why not? But more importantly, what can they do to get ready and better prepared?
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D
Yeah, Wyatt, I think they're 100% ready to adopt agentic AI. You know, part of the mission of the Department of War and these organizations is to have the very best technology, to have the most veloc. The highest impact technologies possible to enhance and deliver on their mission. You know, so when I think about readiness, there's a couple of things that we see that are pretty obvious and are already in process within these organizations to be ready to adopt and leverage things like agentic AI and Agent Force. The first one is the data, the ability to unlock the data silos across the organization to feed the large language models and the agentic AI, you know, that are, that are in the platform. So at Salesforce we have things like MuleSoft Data 360, which is our data fabric. Informatica recently joined our company and portfolio. And so we have some really fundamental data products that help them unlock aggregate and surface data that's important to the agentic layer. The second one is the use case, you know, Picking high impact use cases that you know on day one might not be at the very edge of and top of the mission pyramid, but certainly garners the attention of the leadership team, focuses the organization and the results can quickly be realized. And we believe that's very, very possible and we see it in our federal and civilian customers every day. And then the third is really preparing your organization around. You have these kind of new digital employees that are joining you and preparing your staff and your organization to to work alongside. Look at these as augmentation partners to take on some of the work. I think if you are part of the Department of War, you're looking for anywhere and any place that you can take kind of the routine work and hand it off to technology so that you can free up your very valuable resources to focus on more strategic, impactful mission objectives. So I think they are ready. I think they've been working on their data for a long time. At Salesforce, we're delivering an amazing platform that has been authorized at impact level four, impact level five, top secrets. So and when we deliver that platform, we're delivering all of it so that it is easy to use out of the box. It is not the days of DIY your AI, do it yourself. We do not believe that it's a bolt on that. It's a fully integrated stack of capabilities that go all the way from the CRM or you know, customer relationship management or asset management up through the workflows to the agentic layer that will transform and accelerate the mission within the organization.
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C
Well, Paul Tatum, as always, thank you for taking time to join us today and kind of just share your your insights on the evolution of AI and agentic AI in particular and in particular about how that's likely to impact the national security and defense sectors in the federal government. So thank you so much for joining us.
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D
Great. Thank you Wyatt. Appreciate it.
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A
This segment was sponsored by Salesforce. Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of the Daily Scoop podcast, available on all podcast platforms. If you've already rated the podcast on your platform of choice, thanks so much. High ratings and good reviews of the show help more people to find it. The Daily Scoop Podcast is a production of the Scoop News group in Washington D.C. adam Butler and Carlin Fisher help put the show together and the entire Scoop News Group team contributes. We'll be back tomorrow with more top headlines. Until then, I'm your host as always, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for listening.