Nickolas Guertin Confirmed to Top Navy Acquisition Official Job

The U.S. Senate confirmed Nickolas Guertin Wednesday to serve as the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. Frederick Stefany has served as the acting official in the position since President Joe Biden’s administration came into office in January 2021, and James Geurts previously held the position.

The White House first nominated Guertin to serve as the Navy’s top acquisition official in September 2022. He went before the Senate Armed Services Committee for confirmation hearings in March 2023 and was confirmed this week by a voice vote.

Since December 2021, Guertin has been serving as the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation, where he advises agency leadership “on operational and live fire test and evaluation of Department of Defense weapon systems,” according to the Pentagon.

According to DOD, Guertin has a four-decade combined military career, including work performing “applied research for government and academia in software-reliant and cyber-physical systems at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.”

At DATAWorks 2023 earlier this year, Guertin said that technology research and acquisition can drive the warfighting mission at DOD.

“We’re in the business of new technologies, we’re in the business of evaluating systems that are being fielded that are going to change warfighting environment,” Guertin said. “[We need to] either make our potential opponents uncomfortable by bringing new capabilities to the field or fill gaps in things that we need to be able to be responsive to.”

Amid growing priorities in artificial intelligence development, Guertin has said that the armed forces will need to be diligent in applying trustworthy AI.

“[DOD needs to] think about where we’re going. That applies to the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, the responsible use of that in when it comes to how that gets wired into products and how they’re going to evolve over time,” Guertin said at a conference in August 2022. “Because they’re going to behave differently after we turn them loose into the wild, and how do we establish those fences?”