Opinion: Zumwalt Is Turning Over

 

Unserious: A Navy Without a Compass

The Secretary of the Navy was fired by social-media post while his ships were enforcing a blockade. The replacement for the destroyer we couldn't build is now a battleship we can't afford. And the carrier we have is being reviewed by the administration that owns it. Admiral Zumwalt would not recognize this Navy — and he would not be kind to those who built it.

By Pseudo Publius · Contributor

Bottom Line Up Front 

On 22 April 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan by public announcement from the Pentagon's chief spokesman while Phelan was on Capitol Hill briefing Congress on the Navy's budget. The firing came one day after Phelan, at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium, publicly defended the proposed Trump-class Guided Missile Battleship (BBG[X]) — a three-ship program with a lead-ship cost of $17.47 billion and a program-of-record cost of $43.5 billion — and announced that the Navy is reviewing the Ford-class carriers CVN-82 and CVN-83 for possible redesign or cancellation. The acting Secretary, Under Secretary Hung Cao, was sworn into his number-two position only six months ago and has no prior shipbuilding portfolio. The precipitating dispute was not policy; it was that Phelan could not deliver the President's 2028 battleship keel-laying on a schedule the industrial base cannot physically meet — the published plan slips delivery to August 2036 — and that Phelan's direct texting relationship with the President had come to irritate the Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, the Fiscal Year 2027 budget request asks for $65.8 billion for Navy shipbuilding while the Navy simultaneously reviews whether to cancel two aircraft carriers that would sustain the statutory 11-CVN floor. The Zumwalt class — three hulls, roughly $25 billion sunk — remains in search of a mission. Gerald R. Ford is on day 296 of deployment with fire-damaged berthing and a sewage system that fails daily. This is not a coherent maritime strategy. It is improvisation at the top of a Navy that has a war on, and the Sailors are absorbing the consequences.

On the morning of Wednesday, 22 April 2026, the Secretary of the Navy was on Capitol Hill discussing the service's budget proposal with members of Congress. That afternoon, without warning to him, the Pentagon's chief spokesman posted on X that Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan was "departing the administration, effective immediately." Phelan, according to multiple accounts, learned of his own firing from the post. He went to the White House in person looking for the President. He could not find him. He walked the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building asking anyone he recognized whether the President actually knew. Eventually the President telephoned him to confirm it. The next day, on Truth Social, the President called Phelan "a long time friend, and very successful businessman" and said he hoped to have him back in the administration someday. The Secretary of War thanked him for his service and wished him well.

This happened while the United States Navy was enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports. It happened during the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium — the service's single largest annual professional gathering — at which Phelan had been the keynote speaker twenty-four hours earlier. It happened two weeks after Hegseth removed the Army Chief of Staff, the head of Army Transformation and Training Command, and the Army's Chief of Chaplains. It is the first firing of a service secretary during this administration, and the first firing of a sitting Secretary of the Navy in wartime in living memory.

The firing was not, at bottom, about policy. Multiple accounts from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Axios, and NBC News converge on a set of proximate causes: Hegseth believed Phelan was moving too slowly on shipbuilding reform; Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of War Stephen Feinberg wanted shipbuilding authority moved from the Navy Secretariat to the Office of the Secretary of War; Phelan had a direct texting relationship with the President, whose Mar-a-Lago residence is near Phelan's own Palm Beach mansion, and the two reportedly exchanged late-night messages about "rusty ships." Hegseth considered this an end-run around the chain of command. In a White House meeting on shipbuilding Wednesday morning, the President grew frustrated with slow progress and told Hegseth to "take care of it." Hegseth did. The New York Times reported that Phelan had originally sold the President on the battleship program by showing him oil paintings of the Iowa-class in action. He then spent thirteen months discovering that the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base physically cannot deliver a forty-thousand-ton capital ship on campaign-promise timelines. That discovery cost him his job.

The Battleship That Cannot Be Built on Time

The specific shipbuilding program at the center of this dispute is the Trump-class Guided Missile Battleship, designated BBG(X). Announced by the President at Mar-a-Lago in December 2025 as the centerpiece of a new "Golden Fleet," the class is envisioned as three large surface combatants, 840–880 feet long and 35,000–41,000 tons displacement, carrying deep vertical-launch magazines, Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles, directed-energy weapons, and a revived naval-gunfire capability of unspecified caliber. The lead ship is notionally named Defiant.

The program's cost and schedule, as published by the Navy on the eve of Phelan's firing, are as follows:

• BBG(X) Trump-class — FY 2027 Budget Submission
• FY27 advance procurement funding$1.00 B
• FY28 procurement (BBG-1 Defiant, net)$16.47 B
• BBG-1 gross weapon-system cost$17.47 B
• BBG-2 procurement (FY30, projected)$13.00 B
• BBG-3 procurement (FY31, projected)$11.50 B
• Program total across FYDP$43.50 B
• Lead-ship award April 2028
• Construction start August 2028
• BBG-1 delivery August 2036

Several features of this table deserve attention. The first is that $17.47 billion for a single surface combatant exceeds the projected procurement cost of a follow-on Ford-class aircraft carrier, which the Congressional Research Service places between $13 and $15 billion. The Navy is proposing to pay more for one battleship than for one nuclear-powered supercarrier. The second is that the delivery date — August 2036 — is eight years after the President's original public timeline. The third is that as of the FY27 budget submission, the Navy had engaged exactly two vendors in concept conversations. No design had been selected. No contract had been awarded. The acquisition strategy, in Phelan's own Sea-Air-Space remarks, was still being worked out. On those facts, the probability of laying Defiant's keel in 2028, as the President demanded, is not low. It is zero.

Phelan, to his credit, seems to have understood this. In his Tuesday roundtable he acknowledged that the $17 billion figure "is the early initial estimate" and said "we'll see where we really settle down as we get through that and start to rationalize some of the costs." This was the careful language of a financier who had run the numbers and did not like what he saw. In the same session he defended the ship against critics — "I've heard the critiques, too vulnerable, too expensive, too big. We've heard that before about carriers and about submarines" — but his defense was performative. The arithmetic had already defeated him. He was fired twenty-eight hours later.

On those facts, the probability of laying Defiant's keel in 2028 is not low. It is zero.

The battleship's operational concept, as described in the FY27 budget justification and Phelan's own remarks, is worth reading carefully. It is supposed to "deliver high-volume, long-range offensive fires," serve as "a robust, survivable forward command and control platform," host an embarked fleet staff, mount high-energy lasers and electromagnetic railguns (neither currently fielded), reduce reliance on expensive single-use munitions, and perform strike, air defense, anti-submarine, and anti-surface warfare at the highest level. It is, in other words, a battleship, a strike cruiser, a missile cruiser, a command ship, a directed-energy testbed, and — if the railgun ever works — a naval-gunfire platform, combined in one $17 billion hull. This is the program management profile of the original Zumwalt class at conception. The reader is invited to recall how that turned out.

The Carrier That Is Under Review by the Administration That Owns It

On the same day Phelan rolled out the battleship budget, he also disclosed that the Navy is conducting a formal review of the Ford-class aircraft carriers CVN-82 (William J. Clinton) and CVN-83 (George W. Bush), neither yet under contract. The stated purpose of the review is to "review the costs, the designs, the systems, to make sure they make sense, and they have all the systems and requirements that we want going forward." The review is due to complete at the end of May 2026. Inside Defense reported that senior Navy leadership has not ruled out cancellation of future Ford-class hulls or a transition to a new design.

Phelan was notably candid about the specific subject of the review. The Navy will evaluate, he said, "is the sortie rate generation that much greater? And then, what are the cost implications of this electric catapult? And did it really generate the savings? You know, the Navy would like to say, 'we've saved five billion dollars in terms of savings in number of men and maintenance.' I just need to check that back up." That language — "I just need to check that back up" — is not the language of a service secretary endorsing his own platform. It is the language of a man conducting due diligence on a purchase someone else made.

The background here matters. The President has repeatedly and publicly disparaged the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, insisted the Navy should return to steam catapults, and described EMALS as complicated nonsense. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation's FY2024 annual report — the most recent unclassified edition — states that "the reliability and maintainability of CVN 78's EMALS and AAG continue to adversely affect sortie generation and flight operations, which remains the greatest risk to demonstrating operational effectiveness and suitability" in Initial Operational Test and Evaluation. Nearly nine years after commissioning, Gerald R. Ford's sortie-generation-rate testing has not been completed. The core performance claim of the class is unvalidated.

Whether a full redesign, an improved-Nimitz fallback, or a CVN-X clean-sheet successor would serve the Navy better is a legitimate question worth asking. It is not, however, a question one asks for the first time while simultaneously asking Congress to fund a $43.5 billion battleship program. A Navy that cannot decide whether it wants more Ford-class carriers should not be ordering new classes of capital ships.

An Acting Secretary, a Blockade, and No Plan

Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao brings a genuine Navy résumé that his predecessor lacked. Born in Saigon, arriving in the United States as a four-year-old refugee in 1975, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the inaugural graduating class, Naval Academy class of 1996 in ocean engineering, Naval Postgraduate School for applied physics, a thirty-two-year career as a surface warfare officer, explosive-ordnance-disposal officer, and deep-sea diver, with combat deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, retiring as a captain in 2021. He led the recovery of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s aircraft off Martha's Vineyard in 1999. He commanded the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City. He later joined CACI International — the same defense contractor that employed this writer for a portion of his career — before two unsuccessful Republican runs for federal office in Virginia.

Cao was confirmed as Under Secretary six months ago, on 3 October 2025, by a 52–45 Senate vote on party lines. Multiple accounts describe his relationship with Phelan as strained. He has no shipbuilding portfolio, no history as a carrier community advocate, no prior engagement with the Ford-class review, and no established relationship with either the Secretary of War or the President. He inherits, as of 22 April, a Navy conducting a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, a carrier on its 296th day at sea, a Ford-class design review due in four weeks, a $43.5 billion battleship program his predecessor could not defend at the speed the White House demands, a December 2025 Government Accountability Office report on shipyard fire-safety oversight with six unimplemented recommendations, and a fleet that has just suffered three non-combat fires in six weeks. He also inherits whatever institutional memory his predecessor took out the door with him.

The question not being asked in Washington this week is the one that matters. It is not whether Hung Cao is qualified. It is whether the civilian oversight architecture of the United States Navy — Service Secretary, Under Secretary, five-star combatant commander relationships, the testimony-before-Congress rhythm, the annual budget cycle — can function when the Service Secretary is fired by social-media post for failing to deliver a campaign promise that was physically impossible to begin with. The answer, on present evidence, is no. It cannot.

What Admiral Zumwalt Would See

Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr., took the oath as the nineteenth Chief of Naval Operations on 1 July 1970, at age forty-nine, the youngest in the Navy's history. He inherited a service in crisis. Re-enlistment rates after first hitch had collapsed to 9.5 percent against a target of 35. The fleet was worn out by Vietnam. Race riots had erupted aboard Kitty Hawk and Constellation. Morale was, in his own phrase, abysmal. Fourteen days into the job, he sent a message to the entire fleet: "No other problem concerns me as deeply as reversing the downward trend of Navy retention rates and I am committing myself to improving the quality of Navy life in all respects and restoring the fun and zest of going to sea." Over the next four years he issued one hundred twenty-one Z-grams. Eighty-seven were subsequently absorbed into the standing Navy directives system. He integrated the Navy — "there is no black Navy, no white Navy; just one Navy, the United States Navy" — appointed the first African-American admiral, opened ships to women, eliminated what he called "Mickey Mouse" regulations, authorized beards and civilian clothes aboard ship, mandated thirty days' leave after deployment for at least half the crew, and ordered that no Sailor should ever wait in line more than fifteen minutes for anything. He diverted, by back-room arrangement, $40 million from the equipment budget to servicemen's housing.

He did this during an active war. He did it with a smaller defense budget than today's Navy enjoys in real terms. He did it because he understood — as a destroyer skipper who had served in Robinson at Leyte Gulf, as a brown-water commander in Vietnam, as a man whose own son he watched die of cancer contracted from Agent Orange sprayed under his own command — that the Navy's people are the Navy. Everything else is hardware that floats.

"The Navy must instill at all levels an attitude which clearly recognizes the dignity and worth of each individual."
— Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., Z-gram 66, 17 December 1970

Set that record next to today's. A carrier crew improvising sleeping quarters on mess-deck tables after their laundry caught fire. Sailors working nineteen-hour watch cycles fishing T-shirts out of undersized sewage pipes a contractor refused to redesign and the Navy declined to insist on. A Sailor's mother photographing raw sewage overflowing onto a berthing deck and contacting a public-radio reporter because she could get no answer from the Navy. A Chief of Naval Operations telling a Washington think tank that his Sailors "signed up for this." A Secretary of the Navy pitching oil paintings of Iowa-class battleships to a President whose attention span is measured in news cycles, then being fired by X post because he could not deliver a $17 billion ship in two years. An acting Secretary sworn in during a blockade with no confirmed successor on the Senate calendar. A $43.5 billion battleship program that no one outside the White House appears to believe in. A Ford-class review that reads, on its face, like the opening move of buyer's remorse.

Admiral Zumwalt did not agree with every decision his Navy made. He was relieved and dismayed, in retirement, by what he regarded as the erosion of material readiness and the drift of the surface force. He would recognize some things about the 2026 Navy immediately: the strain of extended deployments, the tension between the demands of combatant commanders and the finite supply of hulls, the difficulty of retention in a tight labor market. He would recognize those as old problems.

He would not recognize the rest. He would not recognize a Navy that permits a Sailor's mother to be the person who breaks the news of a habitability crisis. He would not recognize a civilian leadership that fires its own Secretary by public announcement during wartime because he could not deliver an impossible schedule fast enough. He would not recognize an acquisition system that greenlights a $43.5 billion battleship program built around directed-energy weapons and railguns that do not yet work, while the lead ship of the class named for him sits at Ingalls undergoing its third attempt at finding a mission. He would not recognize a Navy in which the Secretary of the Navy, the Under Secretary, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the President disagree in public about whether the most expensive warship in the fleet actually works, while that ship is deployed in combat operations against Iran.

He would call this, and he would be right, unserious.

Three Questions for the Acting Secretary

Acting Secretary Cao inherits a mess that is not of his making. He also inherits, for as long as the administration leaves him in place, the one job in the American defense establishment whose statutory purpose is to act as the civilian conscience of the United States Navy. Three questions are worth his early attention:

First: what is the maritime strategy the Golden Fleet is supposed to execute? The BBG(X) budget documents assert that the battleship will "anchor the high end of the Golden Fleet high-low mix" and operate as part of "Battleship Strike Groups." No published document articulates what a Battleship Strike Group is for that a Carrier Strike Group or a Surface Action Group is not already for. Before Congress is asked to appropriate $17 billion for Defiant, the service owes the country a strategy paper. Project SIXTY, Admiral Zumwalt's September 1970 strategic assessment, was drafted in seventy-two days. The Golden Fleet, sixteen months after its announcement, still lacks one.

Second: if the Ford-class review concludes that CVN-82 and CVN-83 should not be ordered as currently configured, what does the Navy propose instead? An improved Nimitz-class hull is feasible; the basic design is proven, Newport News Shipbuilding retains the tooling, and the EMALS/AAG retrofit risk disappears. A CVN-X clean-sheet design is also feasible but adds a decade. Under no circumstance should the Navy allow a gap to develop between Doris Miller's delivery and the next carrier order. The statutory 11-CVN floor is not an aspirational goal. It is U.S. Code.

Third: what is the acting Secretary's plan to address the conditions reported aboard Gerald R. Ford? Not in the abstract. Specifically: the Vacuum Collection, Holding and Transfer system redesign for CVN-79 before delivery in 2027; the laundry-space fire suppression and berthing-ventilation isolation retrofit for the deployed fleet; the implementation timeline for all six GAO-26-107716 contractor-oversight recommendations; and the independent habitability review this writer called for three days ago in these pages. The Sailors did not fail the Navy. The Navy, at the top, is failing them.

❦ ❦ ❦

A correspondent known to this writer, a retired senior engineer and Navy veteran who served as an Engineering Duty Officer during Admiral Zumwalt's tenure, put the matter plainly when these events were described to him: "I don't think he would be proud of today's Navy." He is not wrong. But Admiral Zumwalt's last, best lesson was not that institutions inevitably decline. It was that they can be turned around. He did it once, in a worse environment than this one, with fewer tools and a larger problem. What he did required three things: a clear strategy, an unflinching honesty about institutional failure, and an absolute, non-negotiable commitment to the dignity and welfare of the Sailors who do the actual work. The United States Navy in April 2026 is short of all three. The Sailors are still there, doing their job. They deserve, at minimum, civilian leadership willing to do the same.

Sources

All URLs verified as of 23 April 2026. Sources are listed in order of first reference.

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Pseudo Publius · For Comment & Discussion · April 2026 · No. II