“I’m asking you, our partners in industry, to help us develop the best things out there, because lives that you saved are going to be our sons and daughters,” Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao told the Modern Day Marine exposition audience on April 29, 2026.
Hung Cao’s pitch to industry
In his first public remarks since being tapped last week to serve as Acting Secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao framed the Navy’s near-term acquisition challenge as an opportunity for new and alternative industrial entrants. Cao said the service is “open to business” with companies that can supply what the Navy needs, and urged partners to “help us develop the best things out there.” He positioned that appeal in moral as well as practical terms: procurement, he said, has life-and-death consequences for sailors and Marines.
Munitions procurement: a multiple-supplier model
Cao illustrated his approach with a concrete procurement example. “Why can’t I not buy my munitions from multiple sources? As long as it fits in that tube, as long as it fits on the aircraft, that’s all that matters,” he said, proposing a mosaic sourcing model: “Let’s just say I need 1,000 of these missiles. If this guy can give me 100, this other guy can give me 50, and this other guy can give me 200, eventually we’ll get to that 1,000, and not have to go through one single vendor.”
His comments underscore a response to the Pentagon’s push for large munitions buys amid operations in the Middle East that have "burned through thousands of weapons from the US stockpile," the reporting notes. Cao’s public embrace of mixed sourcing signals a willingness to accept production and logistics complexity in exchange for speed and scale.
Golden Fleet, tailored forces, and procurement reform
Cao tied procurement changes to the administration’s Golden Fleet initiative, saying the effort “is not just about ships” but also about “reforming acquisitions and getting ships out there from high, low, right?” He described a move toward “tailored forces” that leverage unmanned systems to augment legacy vessels and warned against using high-end ships for every mission—“you can’t use a destroyer for everything. It’s like, you don’t want to use a brain surgeon just to suture up some stitches. I mean, you can use a corpsman for that, right?”
Those remarks link acquisition reform, force structure adjustments, and new platforms in a single strategic frame: diversify the fleet and the industrial base, and match platforms to missions more deliberately.
Budget context: steep increases for missiles and shipbuilding
The Navy’s public procurement posture sits inside a much larger Pentagon budget push. The Pentagon’s budget request for fiscal 2027 increases funding to $70.5 billion for missiles and related line items, up from roughly $24.4 billion in FY26—an increase the story quantifies as 188 percent over what was approved in FY26, according to Breaking Defense’s reporting. The Navy is also seeking $65.8 billion for shipbuilding in FY27, up from $27.2 billion in the FY26 enacted budget.
Those figures frame Cao’s remarks: large, fast-growing demand for munitions and ships creates pressure to expand production quickly and to find suppliers who can scale or complement established defense contractors.
How new entrants, legacy contractors, and the Navy may respond
- New entrants: Cao’s invitation is explicit—if a firm can deliver hardware that fits required interfaces (“fits in that tube, fits on the aircraft”), the Navy will consider it. New suppliers will need to demonstrate rapid producibility and compatibility with existing platforms.
- Legacy contractors: Cao cautioned he is “not trying to bash the old, the big 8 companies,” but said incumbents “sometimes…rest on the laurels.” That comment signals increased pressure on established contractors to accelerate innovation or risk competition from newer firms.
- The Navy’s acquisition apparatus: Cao tied procurement reform to the Golden Fleet and “tailored forces” concepts, suggesting the service intends to reshape acquisition rules or practices to accept multi-supplier solutions and more varied platform mixes.
Cao’s biography, placed alongside his policy pitch, underscores why he presented the message in this form: he previously served as Under Secretary of the Navy, was confirmed to that role in October 2025, joined the Navy as a seaman recruit in 1989, graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1996, completed deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, retired as a captain, and later worked as a vice president and client executive at CACI International. He was tapped last week to serve as Acting Secretary following the departure of Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
The core tension in Cao’s address is practical: big, immediate procurement demands—and sharply higher budget requests for munitions and shipbuilding—create an appetite for rapid diversification of suppliers and platforms. Cao has laid down an open invitation and an operating metaphor (“one thousand” missiles from many makers) that will now be tested against industrial capacity, certification processes, and the logistics of integrating disparate systems into a single force. Will alternate suppliers scale and systems integrate quickly enough to meet the Pentagon’s stated increases? Cao’s speech pushed that question from the planning papers to the expo floor.
