Hung Cao and the Fight to Rebuild America’s Maritime Power Before the Next War Arrives
by Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) The first thing you notice about the US Navy’s Undersecretary Hung Cao is the stillness. Not the polished, hedge-your-words stillness you get from a trained political operator, but the quiet earned through long hours underwater, breathing off a regulator, listening to the low groan of a compromised hull in the dark. There are plenty of men in Washington who theorize about national power or the next hyperintegrated AI superweapon. There are very few who have felt that power humming through steel plates a hundred feet below the surface, cutting into twisted metal while a ship, sometimes an entire fleet, waited for them to finish the job.
Cao is one of those men. A team player. Leaks abound in the politically divided capital, but the only intrigue I could find from his many friends is that of a Senate candidate who didn’t compromise his values to play dirty. A deeply influential MAGA Republican with hundreds of thousands of social media followers whose past videos went viral with the base, he could have angled for an ambassadorship, a senior White House adviser role, or a minor cabinet position. Instead, he chose to focus on rebuilding the Navy.
And now he is seated behind gCaptain’s makeshift desk in the Pentagon briefing room, where the microphones are always hot, discussing the one topic Washington has avoided for decades: the collapse of the maritime foundations… the bedrock of our island nation… that make every ship, every missile, every deployment possible.
His life didn’t move toward this moment by accident. It is a current that began in Vietnam, in the chaotic aftermath of a war America still struggles to understand. Before he ever put on a Navy uniform, he already knew what happens to nations that lose control of the sea. He arrived in America by boat and, maybe inevitably, returned to the water the moment he could. At the Naval Academy, he didn’t chase the glamour tracks. He chased depth. He became an EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) diver, specializing in the quiet, technical, unforgiving work that keeps ships alive.
Related Book: Call Me an American: Refugee to Patriot: Lessons Learned for a Strong America by Hung Cao
“Hung Cao is a patriot and committed to the welfare of our sailors and marines,” said Captain Brent Sadler (ret), Senior fellow at the Heritage who has known Cao before and during his time at the Naval Academy. “He is a true shipmate and what is needed and ready to give tough love where needed to revive our fleet and its shipbuilding.”
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Asia… his operational career spans the places most Americans have only seen on the news crawl. Salvage dives. Explosive clearing. Aircraft recovery. Work where the stakes are measured not in policy wins but in whether a team comes up alive. Later, he moved into counter-UAS work years before drones transformed the battlefield in Ukraine. He didn’t study the problem from afar. He worked in it.
Now Washington has placed him in the role of Under Secretary of the Navy at the moment the Navy’s most vulnerable flank… the industrial, logistical, and commercial backbone of American sea power.. is under acute pressure. The United States has destroyers and submarines that would make Nimitz dizzy, but the supply chain behind them is dangerously thin. In Cao’s view, the country has forgotten how to be a maritime nation.
“We only have seventy-nine.”
There are moments in an interview when the tone shifts, and you can hear the real weight in a leader’s voice. For Cao, it happened when he talked numbers. Hard, uncomfortable numbers.
“We have the strongest and best US Merchant Mariners in the world, but seventy-nine U.S.-flag merchant ships,” he said, matter-of-fact but unmistakably direct. “Seventy-nine, in a country this size. China has thousands.”
He didn’t bother dressing it up. He didn’t have to.
“And just 129 Military Sealift Command manned ships supporting nearly 300 Navy vessels. That’s the fleet we rely on in a crisis.”
He let the implication sit there. America hasn’t built a coherent maritime logistics system in decades. China has built one every year. Sealift isn’t a sexy Pentagon talking point, until war starts. Then it becomes the only talking point.
“This is a maritime nation,” he said, “but we don’t act like one.”
Shipbuilding, the President, and the return of industrial seriousness
I asked him whether this administration actually grasps the depth of the problem… the shipyard shortages, the workforce collapse, the Merchant Marine attrition that has hollowed out America’s strategic mobility.
His answer was immediate.
“The President has made this the top priority,” he said. “And the Secretary of the Navy John Phelan is hyperfocused on building ships. But the effort is larger than the Navy — Transportation, Commerce, OMB — everyone is getting pulled into the same conversation.”
Washington hasn’t spoken with this kind of whole-of-government maritime urgency since the Nixon administration. Most Under Secretaries talk about budgets, force design, procurement cycles, or razzle and dazzle reporters with hyperconnected AI space drone defense systems. Cao talks about welders. Apprenticeships. War fighters. First Responders. Merchant Marines. Navy sailors doing dirty jobs. Industrial surge capacity. American shipyard workers as a national asset.
“We need to energize the public,” he said. “To want to work in these shipyards. To build American might. To man the ships.”
There wasn’t a hint of rhetoric. It sounded more like a diver telling deck crew what has to happen next. The job has to get done. The stakes won’t wait.
A recruiting turnaround Washington didn’t expect
Then came the number that should be on every headline but somehow isn’t.
“The Navy surpassed our recruiting goals by nearly seven thousand sailors this year,” Cao said. “We recruited over forty-four thousand.”
In an era when the services are starving for people and attrition rates skyrocketed under Biden, the Navy pulled off a reversal. That matters a lot because undermanned ships can’t be repaired, can’t be maintained, and can’t sail.
“When you run ships designed for 320 sailors with 270, everything suffers,” he said. “Now we can man them properly. And when these sailors finish their service, they can take their skills into the shipyards or the Merchant Marine.”
Cao wants to formalize that: Navy veterans leaving with journeyman-level welding certifications, FAA certifications for aviation mechanics, commercial salvage qualifications for divers.
Navy service as a pipeline straight into the maritime industrial base.
This is how the Arsenal of Democracy operated. And Cao wants it operating again.
The salvage gap that keeps him up at night
If there was one topic where his voice tightened, where the diver in him surfaced unmistakably, it was salvage.
“We lost many of the Navy’s critical salvage ships and ocean tugs,” he said. “As gCaptain reported we still have no fireboat in San Diego after the USS Bonhomme Richard fire. And we’re struggling to build new rescue and salvage ships.”
These are not fringe assets. They are the ships that recover crashed aircraft, lift damaged hulls, fight fires at sea, and keep a battle group from becoming a collection of expensive flotsam.
He noted that one of the Navy’s few remaining salvage ships is right now in the Western Pacific, salvaging an SH-60 Romeo for our allies. The capability is finite and overstretched.
“These ships can do offshore firefighting,” he said. “They can get alongside and put out a blaze that would otherwise take down the ship.”
Then he said something every American should know:
“At Pearl Harbor, every ship but Utah and Arizona was raised by Navy divers. Raised. Repaired. Returned to the fight.”
He wasn’t being nostalgic. He was issuing a warning: if the Navy cannot recover itself in war, it cannot fight one.
Ports, drones, and the next attack
We talked about ports — the soft underbelly of American sea power. Chinese-built cranes. Foreign software. Containerships with commissars on board. The possibility of a drone swarm launched from a commercial vessel riding up the channel.
“What stops it?” I asked.
“Counter-UAS,” he replied instantly. “I worked on it for three years in the military and four years in industry.”
He described the spectrum from 30 MHz to 8 GHz, the need for sensors, for gimbals, for systems that can see drones shaped to mimic our own. He spoke about Ukraine not as a case study but as a preview. He shook his head in agreement when I mentioned Obama canceled lower-frequency backup programs like Eloran and the Military Amateur Radio Service.
“We have to make sure what’s happening there does not happen here,” he said. “This is the battlefield now.”
Nothing about his tone suggested abstraction. He’s one of the few senior officials who has actually been inside this threat environment.
The battleship question he didn’t laugh off
Before we ended, I asked him something that’s been circulating quietly among naval officers and shipbuilders, a question I asked Pete Hegseth earlier in the day, whether the Navy was seriously exploring Trump’s desire to build a modern “battleship.”
He didn’t wave it away.
But the press handler stepped in for the only time in the interview, telling me the answer is off the record.
Frustrating yes, but less obviation and more building anticipation for an event the Navy plans to announce on December 10th.
The urgency of a diver who knows what failure looks like
The interview ended the way it began, without theatrics. Cao gathered his things. He expressed deep. gratitude to Trump, Hegseth and Phelan for prioritizing the Navy. Staff moved about the briefing room, resetting for the next official. Nothing dramatic happened. Yet the feeling after the conversation was unmistakable: this is a man who has lived inside the physical reality of maritime warfare, not the theoretical one.
He knows what it takes to lift a wrecked aircraft from the seafloor, to salvage a burning ship, to keep a fleet fueled and moving in war. And he knows, with a diver’s precision, how little margin America has left. He is also incredibly smart.
For decades, this country has drifted, outsourcing its shipbuilding, hollowing out its merchant fleet, starving its salvage capability, and pretending the oceans will always be ours.
Hung Cao doesn’t pretend.
He speaks like a man who has seen how quickly things sink and how hard they are to raise.
His demeanor is magnetic, and now I understand why his Senate campaign videos went viral. This man cares. And this is what shipbuilding needs most, someone not afraid of the camera who can explain, with passion and clarity, the importance of building ships.
And in that briefing room, it was impossible not to feel that Washington, finally, has someone willing to say the quiet part out loud:
America is still a maritime nation.
But only if it chooses to act like one.
Related Book: Call Me an American: Refugee to Patriot: Lessons Learned for a Strong America by Hung Cao
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