February 12, 2026 at 5:40 PM
Navy hustling to modernize hundreds of legacy IT systems via Cattle Drive
The effort is designed to “round up” outdated and vulnerable IT assets — and then reinvest funds into higher-priority platforms and pursuits. The post Navy hustling to modernize hundreds of legacy IT systems via Cattle...
SAN DIEGO — Five years into Operation Cattle Drive, the Navy has shut down more than two dozen outdated IT systems and pinpointed hundreds more that must be revamped, merged or decommissioned in the near future, according to the service’s acting Chief Information Officer Barry Tanner. “This has been the year of actually landing on enterprise services and making that real,” he said Tuesday at the WEST 2026 conference. “And in the coming days, we’ll be seeing some specific direction from the [Undersecretary of the Navy Hung Cao] mandating the use of enterprise services across the department — and executing Cattle Drive, which again, we’ve been talking about for a while — but at scale and at speed.” Cattle Drive is designed to “round up” — and update or eliminate — obsolete, redundant, and vulnerable IT assets and then reinvest funds and focus into the sea service’s higher-priority platforms and pursuits.
Navy officials have supplied a few updates on the initiative’s modernization progress since it was first unveiled in late 2020. The effort had reportedly freed up about $150 million as of 2022. “In the last 6 to 8 months, we have identified over 200 systems that are either duplicative of enterprise services that exist already today, or are legacy in nature and need to be modernized and consolidated with others,” Tanner said.