President Trump did not pick a consultant. He did not pick a donor with a yacht and a PowerPoint. On Tuesday he nominated Hung Cao, the acting secretary who has already been running the Department of the Navy since April, and he called him what the last decade of Pentagon fashion tried to unlearn.
I am pleased to nominate a true WARRIOR, Hung Cao, to become the next Secretary of the Navy. We need Patriots like Hung leading our Navy and Marine Corps, and I can think of no one better than him to make sure our Great Navy and Marine Corps remain the FIERCEST and BEST Force the World has ever seen. The Senate needs to confirm this Warfighter, ASAP, so he can continue the fantastic work he has been doing over the past 4 months.
Cao answered the only way a sailor should. “It’s an honor of a lifetime to lead the great warriors of the Navy and Marine Corps team,” he wrote. “I’m grateful for your leadership and support as we continue to get after shipbuilding and ensure the defense of the homeland.”
That is the whole argument. Ships. Homeland. Warfighters. Not a lecture about climate as a national-security threat and not another round of identity training on a carrier that is supposed to be hunting mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
From Saigon to Annapolis
Hung Cao was born in Saigon in 1971. After the fall in 1975 his family fled communism and landed in America, then spent years in West Africa before he returned to Northern Virginia at twelve. He enlisted as a seaman recruit in 1989. The Naval Academy commissioned him in 1996. He became a Navy diver and explosive ordnance disposal officer, the kind of work that happens in dark water with a bomb that does not care about your feelings.
He deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. In 1999 he led salvage work that recovered the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette, and Lauren Bessette after their plane went down off Martha’s Vineyard. He retired a captain in 2021. Then Virginia Democrats beat him twice, first for the House in 2022 and then for the Senate against Tim Kaine in 2024, even with Trump stumping for him in the Eden Center. The voters of Northern Virginia kept their senator. The country got a better use for the man they passed over.
The Senate already knew who he was. It confirmed him as under secretary in October 2025 by a 52-45 vote. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to sit it out. On April 22 he became acting secretary after John Phelan was pushed out amid the fight over shipbuilding speed. Phelan was a businessman. Cao had spent a career in the water.
The Warrior Ethos Comes Back Aboard
Four months is not a trial balloon. It is a record. Cao has been driving the administration’s Golden Fleet push, the attempt to rebuild yards and hulls after years of late ships, bloated programs, and a fleet that shrank while China laid keels. He has also done the unfashionable work the last administration treated as a moral stain. The Department of the Navy has been restoring careers, correcting records, and paying back the sailors and Marines who were thrown out over the Biden COVID mandate. Cao put it in plain language. “To the sailors and marines who were wrongfully discharged during COVID, we failed you. We will never allow this to happen again, not on my watch.”
That is not branding. That is repentance with a signature block.
He has the same allergy to ritual panic. After a Blue Angels jet flew low over Pensacola Beach in July and sent chairs and umbrellas flying, the usual chorus demanded a scalp. Cao posted the debrief. “No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom.” Pete Hegseth piled on. The flyovers will continue until morale improves. The professional scolds called it dangerous. A country that cannot stand the sound of its own jets has already started losing the next war.
Legacy outlets framed the nomination as another Pentagon “purge” next to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation and a long Abraham Lincoln deployment in the Iran fight. They always do. What they will not say is that the last team spent years sanding the sharp edges off the force and then acted shocked when readiness reports turned ugly. A refugee who watched Saigon fall does not need a seminar on why a navy exists.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.
Confirm him. Let the man who crawled through wreckage and wire keep building the fleet that has to meet the next one. The Senate already voted for him once. Doing it again should not require a prayer breakfast and a six-month stall.
