Key Takeaways From the 2025 Navy Summit

Co-authored by Pat Host

Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Navy Summit was the grand finale of our DOD Summer Series, which began with the 2025 Army Summit in June and ramped up speed in July with the 2025 Air and Space Summit. On Aug. 26, a robust selection of the sea service’s top leadership shared their unique perspectives with a bustling audience of government contractors at the Hilton McLean in Virginia.

Their insights spanned technology systems to thematic trends in the service to modernization needs. We’ve collected the most important takeaways below.

And be sure to join Potomac Officers Club for its fantastic slate of fall GovCon-focused events: the 2025 Intel Summit and 2025 GovCon International Summit, both in October, and the 2025 Homeland Security Summit on Nov. 12.

Need to focus on mission performance & readiness

During the “Consolidating the Digital Frontier: Modernizing Navy IT for a Unified Ecosystem” panel early in the day, Scott St. Pierre, the Navy’s director of enterprise networks and cybersecurity, said that in the past, conversations around enterprise IT have been centered on products and capabilities.

“They have to be about mission performance now,” he issued.

Later in the day, VADM Brad Skillman, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, in his afternoon keynote address echoed these sentiments.

VADM Skillman said that the recent reconciliation bill — President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — focused on procurement and capabilities accounts and not so much on readiness. In fact, throughout his seven tours at the Pentagon, Skillman said the Department of Defense hasn’t solved the readiness problem.

Navy could offer sensing capability to Golden Dome

The Golden Dome lunch panel presented a number of innovative ways Golden Dome, which is first and foremost a space-based initiative, can be supported by the Navy. Dan Knight, a vice president at Orion Space Solutions, said that the Navy has “offered a tremendous amount of sensing and kill chain capability over the years, and I think that that will be extrapolated [for Golden Dome].”

Moderator Roy Kitchener, a decorated Navy vet and current Booz Allen Hamilton senior advisor, said that the Navy has a “really good” ballistic missile defense capability; panel participant Tim Foerster, SAIC SVP, went a step further, saying that Golden Dome cannot be effectively implemented without this capability, citing experimentation done at this year’s Thunderdome.

Lessons from Aegis for Golden Dome

Retired Rear Adm. Doug Small, former NAVWAR commander, during his fireside chat with Exiger SVP Theresa Campobasso shared a lesson he learned from the Navy’s experience with its Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System that DOD could leverage as it develops and rolls out Golden Dome: test quickly, experiment and expect the unexpected.

“Every time we went to see what it could do, we found it could do a lot more than anyone thought…Then it became a capability,” Small said. “Tactics evolved to change the system from air defense to ballistic missile defense…Smart people figured out how to portion the resources to go after ballistic missiles.”

Better communication needed between industry and Navy

Industry and the Navy better communicating with each other to get the best technologies in warfighter hands was a constant theme throughout the day. During the “Opportunities and Challenges in Delivering UXV to the Navy” panel, Capt. Matt Lewis, Navy program manager for unmanned maritime systems (PMS 406), said the service wants to see action and not hear talk when it comes to new capabilities.

“Times are changing from presenting white papers or PowerPoints, to ‘show us, demonstrate you can do this. Put something in the water,’” Lewis said. “We don’t have capacity or time to talk about something in theory and then figure out how to make it happen down range.”

Develop technology fast, but with the right purpose

Another common theme throughout the event was even the most sophisticated and advanced technology is no good if the warfighters don’t use it. During the “Accelerating Naval Capabilities: Partnering with Industry for Speed to Fleet” panel, David Britt, MANTECH vice president of defense innovation and technology, said quickly getting sophisticated technologies to sailors is important, but it needs to meet the use case.

“Speed is great, but it has to be anchored in systems engineering,” Britt said. “When I was in fleet, when something new would come out that would help me with my mission use case, then I would be apt to use it. Understanding that use case is very very important.”

Richard Okrasinski, Navy director for C4I and commander of Submarine Forces Atlantic, offered a tip to contractors during the same panel.

“How do we get the feedback? You’d be surprised how much stuff we put out there for the fleet that they ignore,” Okrasinski said. “If the captain doesn’t care about it, neither will the fleet.”

Advanced threats from AI

The benefits and challenges of AI in a military context is always a hot topic at Potomac Officers Club summits. During the “Optimizing Navy Decision-Making with GenAI: Balancing Human Insight With AI Precision” panel, Chris Fraser, Exiger Government Solutions senior vice president, noticed how GenAI makes advanced persistent threats from capable adversaries even faster.

Fraser cited research from Microsoft and OpenAI about monitoring persistent threats and large language models.

“One of the Chinese actors…was looking at think tanks for Chinese expertise to…target with some type of phishing campaign,” Fraser said. “That you can use LLMs from the research or the reconnaissance phase all the way to scripting and more advanced scripting just elevates the speed at which an advanced persistent threat can carry out campaigns.”

We’re moving past the 1980s

The legacy of the 1980s continues on in many ways, but reports from the Navy Summit were that we finally have the technology and funding to move past that bygone era. During the Golden Dome-focused lunch panel, the trio of industry participants said that while the Brilliant Pebbles missile defense effort that was born during President Reagan’s second term was ultimately canceled, we are better equipped now to launch such a venture and that Golden Dome is a real possibility today to be executed successfully.

Meanwhile, according to VADM Skillman, while President Reagan’s two terms saw an immense “defense build-up,” increasing defense spending by over a third, he has more budget at his disposal now than during that time of ballooning DOD resources, creating exciting opportunities.

Building an unmanned fleet at scale

The Navy is making progress toward a hybrid fleet consisting of both autonomous and unmanned craft with traditional, human-powered ships. But the benefits of having these unmanned ships in the fleet will be muted if they require lots of people to operate, said VATN Systems CEO Nelson Mills.

“We want to focus on building at scale. As part of that, it’s also about giving skills to the government to deploy these at scale,” Mills said. “[It’s] great to have 1,000 [unmanned] undersea vehicles, but if each vehicle requires tens of people, they’re not true force multipliers.”

The U.S. is behind on shipbuilding

Building on sentiments expressed by recently appointed Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle, speakers at the Navy Summit underlined America’s struggle to compete with China in shipbuilding.

Lt. Artem Sherbinin, chief technology officer of U.S. Naval Surface Force, shared that the U.S. accounts for only 0.01 percent of global shipbuilding capacity, while China is over 50 percent.

For more in-depth updates on federal policies and government-industry partnerships like these, be sure to register for the next Potomac Officers Club event: the highly anticipated 2025 Intel Summit, set for Oct. 2. Register today to gain exclusive intelligence community insights!