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The acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, who steps into the role after the sudden departure of John Phelan, is a veteran naval officer and former refugee who earned a position with the Trump administration with campaigns for political office in Virginia marked by religious intolerance.

When Cao was first appointed, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, set him to modernizing base infrastructure and quality-of-life issues for sailors and marines, and to raise recruiting standards. Cao has also been a point person in the administration on permitting vaccine refusal and eliminating “DEI” policies in the military.

He has been sharply outspoken about the military’s recruiting practices, saying in a debate with Tim Kaine when he ran against him for Senate in 2024 that the military should be recruiting “alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds”.

At his confirmation hearing, Cao described an aircraft carrier as “99,000 tons of American diplomacy” but noted that the availability of ships hovered around 60%, which he described as “horrid” readiness.

Asked about his views on how to either use the existing fleet or to transition to a new paradigm for naval warfare, Cao said that the military was living each day like it was 10 September 2001, and that the country must accelerate shipbuilding while improving technology so that it can defeat hypersonic missiles and other threats.

“We need to rethink naval warfare,” Cao said last June. “We need to be ready for what happens tomorrow.”

Cao ran twice for federal office as a Republican candidate in Virginia, falling to US representative Jennifer Wexton in a House race in Virginia’s northern suburbs in 2022, then to Senator Tim Kaine in 2024.

Cao’s comments in an interview about Monterey being taken over by “witches” and a joke about being “African American” because he lived in Africa as a child became a campaign issue. Cao expressed support for a national abortion ban as a candidate.

Cao, 55, fled Vietnam with his family when he was four years old. He lived in Niger as a child while his father worked for USAID. Cao enlisted in the navy in 1989 before graduating from the US Naval Academy and earning a commission as a special operations officer.

He served on active duty as a diver and explosive ordnance technician with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, notably leading the team that recovered the body of John F Kennedy Jr off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Cao was section head for the budget programming division in the office of the chief of naval operations before retiring as a captain in 2021. He has a master’s degree in applied physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and completed fellowships at MIT and Harvard.

“I came to this country with nothing, as a refugee,” Cao said in response to a question during his confirmation hearing as undersecretary of the navy. “We grew up in Africa, actually. In 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, the marines brought us into the embassy and stood watch over us in case they had to do an evacuation … I wanted to be like those heroes, so I have dedicated my entire life to serving the military.”

Cao’s son graduates this year from the US Naval Academy.