Sometimes the life stories of those I profile reflect hardship and courage long before their military service. Such is the case with Hung Cao, who in February 2025 was nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate as Under Secretary of the Navy, the service’s number-two slot below SecNav.

His life story begins in Saigon, South Vietnam, where he was born in 1971. His father worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, and his mother raised their family during the raging Vietnam War.

Hung’s family fled the country in 1975, immigrating to the United States. After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, he enlisted in the Navy as a Seaman Recruit in 1989. In 1992, he was selected to attend the United States Naval Academy, graduating from USNA in 1996.

He became a Special Operations Officer (Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Deep Sea Diving), serving multiple SpecOps deployments during both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, as well as in Somalia.

In 2008, Hung received a Master’s of Science in Applied Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School. He then completed fellowships at MIT and Harvard. In addition to being qualified as a Navy SpecOps and EOD and Diving Officer, he was also a Naval Parachutist and Surface Warfare Officer.

His non-combat service assignments included working with both Homeland Security and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Hung devoted 30 years to active-duty Navy service, and he and his wife, April, served in many locations during that time. They now have five children.

After separating from the Navy in 2021, he became Vice President of CACI International, a Fortune 500 technology company in Northern Virginia providing services to U.S. defense, intelligence, and homeland security agencies. He helped field electronic warfare packages, counter-drone technology, and optical communications, and then optimized shipyard infrastructure for the Navy.

Having settled in Virginia after Naval service, he also ran for Senate in 2024 against Demo Tim Kaine. While he won the Republican primary by a large margin in a field including other distinguished Veterans, he was defeated in the general election because, well, Virginia has taken a deep dive to the left.

In April, Trump nominated Hung to be Acting Secretary of the Navy, and he assumed those duties following the departure of former SecNav John Phelan, who had no prior military service.

Trump noted, in addition to Hung’s considerable qualifications, that he was “the embodiment of the American Dream,” saying further: “Hung worked tirelessly to make proud the country that gave his family a home. With Hung’s experience both in combat and in the Pentagon, he will get the job done.”

As for that embodiment, Hung says, “Don’t come to this country seeking the American Dream if you’re not willing to obey its laws and embrace its culture.”

For his part, restoring the Navy’s standards after the military degradation under the Biden/Harris regime, Hung says: “I don’t need cross-dressers in the military. I need alpha males and alpha females.” He added that our military needs “meat eaters,” not “leaf eaters.”

Hung is part of Trump’s new breed of leaders. When Trump returned to office last year, he set about appointing “communicators” and “disruptors” to key cabinet and senior leadership positions — instead of just administrators — with the objective of waking up and shaking up the bureaucracies.

Trump’s management style is sometimes characterized as organized chaos, leaving his opponents completely befuddled. As I have noted previously, Trump has dropped a bomb on the Beltway status quo in Congress and its special interests. He dropped a bomb on the regulatory behemoths and their bureaucratic bottlenecks. He dropped a bomb on the trade and national security institutions and alliances that had failed miserably over the Barack Obama and Joe Biden years. And he dropped a bomb on all the pundits and mainstream media outlets.

Like Hung, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has proven likewise to be an effective communicator and disruptor as a leader.

And Hung’s realignment of leadership in some high-level Navy operation sectors is already underway.

Clearly, he has also assumed his role in Trump’s three-dimensional chess strategy with China and Taiwan amid the efforts to completely disarm Iran’s “Islamic Bomb” capabilities.

In a review of Hung’s bio, “Call Me an American: Refugee to Patriot,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says: “[His] remarkable and inspiring story of how his family survived the defeat in Vietnam, overcame the adversity of having to flee communism, and established themselves in a new land of opportunity and freedom is a stunning tribute both to his family and to the America he served in the military. Hung is the kind of energetic, intelligent, and courageous leader who will make America a better country.”

Indeed, he is.

From child refugee of a war-torn nation to our nation’s Secretary of the Navy, the Honorable Hung Cao is a formidable leader.

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of American Liberty, and for our nation’s Veterans, First Responders, and their families.

(Read more Profiles of Valor here.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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