The Department of the Navy identified over 200 duplicative IT systems that it will consolidate, modernize, or shut down in the coming months, Navy Chief Information Officer (CIO) Barry Tanner said.
While speaking at the WEST 2026 conference on Feb. 11, Tanner said that 25 of those 200 systems have been shut down. That effort falls under Operation CATTLE Drive, which launched in 2020 to sunset or rationalize certain IT systems and applications deemed duplicative or unnecessary, and reinvest those savings into Navy portfolios.
“In each of those [25] cases, it was, ‘Oh, well, yeah, we really don’t need to do [it] like this anymore,’ and it was … very easy … to move from the old way to the new way. In other places, it’s ‘All right, there are a lot of hard problems we have to solve here,’” Tanner said.
The CIO said the other identified systems are slated for modernization or integration into enterprise services over the next year. Those systems present more complex challenges and are often tied to unique mission needs or capability gaps in enterprise platforms, Tanner explained.
Going forward, he said that the Navy’s strategy is to close those gaps, evolve enterprise services to meet all mission requirements, and then consolidate.
“… we are gonna keep the best and sweep the rest,” Tanner said.
He also noted that the Navy has identified a leading learning management system as a “prime candidate” to be elevated into a formal enterprise service. He said potential platforms have been assessed against enterprise-grade requirements such as resilience and the ability to meet both common and mission-specific needs.
“We’re actively going out, identifying things through reporting and saying ‘That should be consolidated’ … building plans, tracking those plans, and then sunsetting,” Tanner said.
While the push for modernization and elimination has been ongoing since 2020, it was ramped up in August under a sprint model, Tanner explained. That sprint initially unveiled 150 duplicative systems. The latest number, 200 plus, comes from a broader evaluation of systems.
Moving forward, Tanner said efforts to consolidate and eliminate systems will be embedded in the annual fiscal review and budgeting process for the Department of Defense – which was rebranded as the Department of War by the Trump administration.
“We’re just really not good at turning things off. And part of that is we never really connected some of these initiatives into the true budgeting process, and we’re fixing that,” Tanner said.
“So every year we will be reviewing, here are all the things we kind of drove, here’s how they were resourced and funded, and here’s where they’re going to go away,” he added. “And those funding streams will stop. We did that first iteration this year, and we’re gonna be doing [it] every single review going forward. It will be part of the normal budgeting process.”
A 2022 report said that Operation CATTLE Drive had saved $150 million to reinvest in Navy portfolios.