Navy’s Future Fleet Hinges on Autonomy, Agility

The Department of the Navy’s future fleet will be built on technology and innovation, department leaders said earlier this month during the AFCEA/USNI WEST conference in San Diego, California.

Legacy platforms and traditional acquisition timelines are no longer sufficient to secure maritime dominance. The department will emphasize next-generation ships and submarines, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, and a more agile, innovative industrial base.

“The Navy is rapidly adopting AI and digital capabilities to increase the lethality and survivability of the fleet with unmanned systems that provide mass and flexibility with AI enabled command and control that turned platforms into a coherent fleet, private sector partnership that delivers speed and scale,” Navy Secretary John Phelan said during the conference. “That is how we translate technology, capital and partnership into command of the seas.”

Next-Generation Ships and Subs

President Donald Trump’s Golden Fleet strategy, released in December 2025, outlined a hybrid fleet design combining crewed and uncrewed systems to disperse lethality, extend sensor ranges and absorb operational risk in highly contested environments.

The submarine force is undergoing transformation as part of this modernization push, officials said. Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, commander of Naval Submarine Forces, said digital engineering and advanced simulation will help DON maintain undersea dominance. Moving away from legacy systems to modern digital environments is critical, he added.

“We’ve got to get out of that legacy approach going forward. Trying to just bolt on technology to legacy processes is not the way we need to do it,” Gaucher said. “We need to change the process and change the policy to leverage what technology can bring to bear.”

The push for better technology is foundational to how the Navy develops unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), officials said. The integration of UUVs into the fleet requires rigorous testing to DON can execute missions autonomously in the harshest environment on Earth, Gaucher said.

“The real secret sauce is our common development environment. It allows us to analyze thousands of runs, refine vehicle performance and ensure that unmanned systems operate safely and effectively before deployment,” said Gaucher.

AI and Autonomy

The future fleet hinges on better use of data across naval systems, leaders said. AI and autonomy will allow warfighters to operate more effectively, augmenting the Navy’s lethality.

“AI is impacting … the speed of our ability to learn from data,” Stuart Wagner, the Department of the Navy’s chief digital and AI officer said during a panel on applying AI for combat advantage. “It’s going to change the character of war. It’s definitely going to change administrative tasks, but I think it’s going to be employed in the same way during war, and it’s going to expedite the ability to deliver data-driven effects with warfighting capability.”

The Marine Corps is pushing AI capabilities directly to the warfighter and using it to better give warfighters tools to fight. Maj. Christopher Clark, the Marine Corps AI Lead, told GovCIO Media & Research that AI is helping Marines process imagery to improve decision-making at the edge.

“We have a lot of overhead imagery, which is great when you’re using computer vision, machine learning models that are, you know, doing that type of image classification,” Clark said in January. “Once we get a significant collection of images, we can retrain the model and federate it. In some cases, we can federate it out to the enterprise. Being able to get the data is critical.”

This human-machine teaming approach is echoed across the submarine force as well, where acoustic analysis is becoming increasingly data-heavy, Gaucher said.

Trust is built through repeated, safe and measurable use. Over time, as we integrate AI responsibly, it will become a reliable tool that enhances — not replaces — sailors’ decision-making.”

Industrial Base

The future fleet requires agile, adaptable partners in industry to provide technological capabilities, officials said. Robotic and Autonomous Systems Portfolio Acquisition Executive and Project Overmatch Director Rebecca Gassler said she is looking for partners who break the vertical stack of contracting.

“We’ve got to sit down and we’ve got to figure out the technical solution where … I don’t lock everyone down, but we’ve got to make all those different pieces of data [work with DON strategy],” Gassler said during WEST. “We’ve got to get [new technology] in the right place at the right time.”

Other Navy leaders are calling on industry to bring actionable AI from training environments to the fleet. DON CTO Justin Fanelli said that the department’s Innovation Adoption Kit requires that new, off-the-shelf AI tools will need to accelerate the kill chain.

“Download the innovation adoption kit. We’re trying to compress the [Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act ] Loop, figure out what the baseline is, and then show how your product improves, something baseline in a significant way, with divestments and which PAE that’s in,” Fanelli said during WEST.

Fanelli added that the future fleet will only thrive is DON can rapidly pivot toward successful technologies and cut underperforming ones, in line with Hegseth’s Arsenal of Freedom approach to acquisition.

“The innovation adoption kit is the formula to show A/B testing and tell us which of the handful of portfolios that goes in so that we can do a disruptive bet. We want creative destruction. We want jump aheads,” Fanelli declared.

Gassler added that she is prioritizing iterative development and agile delivery to reduce risk exposure.

“You are now not going after tooling up your entire ecosystem, whether that be factory production lines or whether it be scrum teams on the software side, without getting that incremental feedback, without getting that adjustment,” Gassler said.

Fanelli promised his office’s commitment to the industrial base, saying that results-driven innovation will be rewarded and defended against bureaucratic inertia.

“If you have field work, you frame it in outcome driven metrics and you bring it to the jar? I will back you up,” Fanelli said.

Strategic Implications

The combination of next-generation platforms, AI and a revitalized industrial base represents a fundamental realignment of the Navy’s strategic posture, officials said.

The department must field a force capable of distributed maritime operations, Vice Adm. Mike Vernazza, commander of Naval Information Forces, told reporters during the conference. He said the Navy will standardize and certify fleet Maritime Operations Centers by 2027. Under his leadership, the MOC is being treated as a distinct weapon system that digests intelligence, surveils the battlespace and orchestrates complex joint operations using emerging technologies such as AI.

“AI is going to help on simplifying staff tasks, so those staff officers and the people we have in the MOC can be focused on other things, focused more on warfighting,” Vernazza told reporters during a media roundtable at WEST.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle unveiled the United States Navy Fighting Instructions”during the conference. The plan synchronizes the fleet’s mindset and force structure against looming great power threats and calls for strategic plans to translate into kinetic capability.

“U.S. Navy fighting instructions aren’t just guidance for the fleet, they’re a clear and bright demand signal to our industry and allied partners about the [advanced technological] capabilities we must build, scale, integrate and sustain,” Caudle said.