Hung Cao's Sudden Rise to the Top of the US Navy
By Ben Lee | 27 Apr, 2026

His appointment as acting Navy Secretary caps a rapid rise for the former Vietnamese American Republican senate candidate.

On the morning of April 22, 2026, Navy Secretary John Phelan stepped onto a stage at the annual Sea-Air-Space conference in Washington and laid out his vision for the service. By that afternoon, he was gone — dismissed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with a terse Pentagon statement saying he was "departing the administration, effective immediately." 

The man tapped to replace him, effective that same day, was Hung Cao, the Navy's under secretary and a retired captain who'd spent three decades hauling bombs out of the sea and leading Special Operations missions in some of the world's most dangerous places.

It's the kind of ascent that doesn't happen often in Washington — a refugee from Saigon, a first-generation American, a combat veteran who twice ran for federal office and twice lost, now sitting atop one of the most powerful military institutions on earth. Cao's story doesn't follow a conventional political arc. It follows something older and more American: flight, reinvention, and an insistence on proving belonging through service.

Born in Saigon, Shaped in America

Hung Cao was born on August 3, 1971, in Saigon, South Vietnam, the son of Quan Cao, a man who worked in South Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and served as assistant to the deputy prime minister. His father was a government man in a government that was running out of time.

When Saigon fell in April 1975, Hung Cao was four years old. His family fled with the wave of Vietnamese refugees who washed up on American shores in the final, chaotic days of the war. It's a detail Cao has returned to often in his public life — not as trauma, but as a lens. He knows what it means to lose a country. That knowledge, he's argued, is exactly why he's fought so hard to protect this one.

His childhood wasn't entirely spent in suburban America. His father found work as an agricultural specialist for USAID and was posted to Niger, where Cao spent part of his formative years. He returned to the US at age 12 and landed in Fairfax County, Virginia, where he'd go on to become part of something remarkable: the first graduating class of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, now one of the most competitive magnet schools in the country.

A Naval Career Built on Hazard

From Thomas Jefferson, Cao made his way to the US Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in ocean engineering. He'd entered the Navy as a seaman recruit back in 1989, before his academy years, and by the time he earned his commission he was already oriented toward the most technically demanding corners of naval service. He'd go on to specialize in explosive ordnance disposal — the work of finding and neutralizing bombs — and deep-sea salvage diving.

It's unglamorous, dangerous work, and it took him to some of the highest-stakes assignments the Navy offers. He deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia over the course of his career, leading underwater missions and counter-IED operations. He later commanded the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Florida, and served as division chief of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

But one assignment stands apart from the rest in the public imagination. In 1999, Cao was serving as operations officer aboard the USNS Grasp when the ship was dispatched to search for the wreckage of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, which had gone down off Martha's Vineyard with Kennedy, his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren aboard. Cao led the Navy team that located the aircraft and personally rigged it for recovery. "We were able to recover the body of, really, America's son, and lay him to rest," he told National Review in 2022.

He continued his education alongside his operational duties. In 2008, he earned a Master of Science in Applied Physics from the Naval Postgraduate School. He retired as a Navy captain in October 2021, after more than three decades on active duty.

The Turn to Politics

Retirement didn't slow Cao down. He moved into the private sector — becoming a vice president and client executive at CACI International, a defense contractor — but he was already thinking about a different kind of service. What pushed him toward politics, he's said, was the Biden administration's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. For a man who'd fled Saigon and spent his career fighting in or around failing states, watching Kabul fall on television was something more than a news event. It was a personal reckoning.

He entered the 2022 race for Virginia's 10th Congressional District as a Republican, one of 11 candidates in the ranked-choice primary. He won his party's nomination by roughly 2,800 votes and went on to face three-term Democratic incumbent Jennifer Wexton in the general election. The district, which includes large populations of Asian Americans and military families, seemed tailor-made for a candidate with Cao's profile. He lost nonetheless, 54% to 46%.

He ran again in 2024, this time for the US Senate seat held by Tim Kaine. It was a higher-profile campaign on a tougher map, and it drew scrutiny. A USA Today investigation in June 2024 reported that Cao had claimed in campaign appearances that he was "100% disabled" because he'd been "blown up in combat many times," yet he hadn't received either the Purple Heart or the Navy's Combat Action Ribbon — awards that would normally accompany combat injuries. Cao didn't respond to the newspaper's requests for clarification. Kaine defeated him in November, 54% to 45%.

Confirmation and the Fast Track to the Top

Two losses in two cycles might've ended another politician's ambitions. Instead, Cao landed squarely in the Trump administration's orbit. In February 2025, President Trump nominated him to be Under Secretary of the Navy — the service's second-highest civilian position. Trump highlighted Cao's military background and Pentagon experience in announcing the pick.

The Senate confirmed him on October 1, 2025, by a vote of 52–45. It was a largely party-line result: every Republican except Lisa Murkowski voted yes, while nearly all Democrats voted no. A small number of Democratic senators — Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Brian Schatz — crossed over to support him. Cao was sworn in two days later, on October 3.

He threw himself into the role quickly. In 2025, the Department of the Navy put him in charge of a new cross-departmental portfolio aimed at reinforcing what officials called a "warrior ethos" across the Navy and Marine Corps. He signaled early that he intended to strip out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and raise performance standards across the service.

Then, less than seven months after his swearing-in, John Phelan was out and Cao was in.

Acting Secretary in a Volatile Moment

Cao steps into the Navy's top job at what officials are calling a critical juncture. The service is in the middle of a high-pressure operational period, with naval assets engaged in operations tied to tensions with Iran. The shipbuilding industrial base is under sustained scrutiny. Readiness questions are persistent. And the Pentagon itself has been rocked by a series of leadership jolts that have left its civilian hierarchy in flux.

What Cao brings to the role that his predecessor didn't is a lifetime of naval experience — 30 years in uniform, deployments across three combat theaters, and firsthand knowledge of the machinery he now oversees. He's not a financier learning to run a navy. He's a sailor who's also learned to run bureaucracies.

Whether that's enough, and how long he'll hold the acting title, remains to be seen. But for the four-year-old refugee who crossed the Pacific with nothing, and who's spent five decades making himself indispensable to the country that took him in, the job is — at the very least — familiar territory.