The Officer Who Ran Our 2015 Tour Is Now Acting Secretary of the Navy
On a Friday morning in early 2015, a group of martial arts school owners stood inside the United States Navy’s dive school in Panama City, Florida, and were shown around by its commanding officer. His name was Commander Hung Cao. On 22 April 2026 he became Acting Secretary of the Navy. This is what that morning was about, and why it is worth writing down eleven years later.
Disclosure. The 2015 meeting described here was a Martial Arts Wealth Mastery mastermind, run by this magazine’s publisher, Stephen Oliver. The account of the visit comes from the programme’s own member archive. This article reports what is on the public record about Hung Cao’s career and takes no position on his politics; his two election campaigns are stated as fact because they are part of the record, not because this journal has a view about them.
What actually happened that morning
The Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center at Naval Support Activity Panama City is where the United States trains every military diver it fields — Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. It is one of the hardest schools in the American military, and its attrition rate is the reason instructors there think about teaching the way they do.
A mastermind group of school owners was meeting nearby. The commanding officer agreed to walk them through it.
One attendee, Thomas Wright of Wright’s ATA Martial Arts in Memphis, wrote afterwards:
“We began Friday morning with a tour of the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center led by Commander Hung Cao. Commander Cao is an incredible example of Leadership, Perseverance, and Honor. There is no way to listen to this man and not come away challenged to improve your own Management, Discipline, and Leadership skills.”
That is a testimonial, and testimonials are the least reliable prose in this industry. We are quoting it anyway, because the interesting thing about it is what Wright did next. He goes on to describe walking into an elementary school the following Monday morning and leaving two hours later with a seminar booked for the end of that month, a summer programme, and the following school year. Whatever the tour did, it did not send him home with a feeling. It sent him home with a Monday.
Who the officer was
Most of the people on that tour had no particular reason to know the biography of the man showing them around. It is worth knowing now.
| Stage | On the record |
|---|---|
| Born | 1971 in Saigon, South Vietnam |
| Left Vietnam | 1975, aged four, as his family fled |
| Entered the Navy | 1989, as a seaman recruit |
| Education | B.S. ocean engineering, United States Naval Academy, 1996; M.S. applied physics, Naval Postgraduate School, 2008 |
| Specialty | Explosive ordnance disposal and salvage diving; operational deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia |
| 1999 | Led the Navy team that recovered the bodies from the Martha’s Vineyard aircraft crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. |
| Commanded NDSTC | September 2013 to June 2016 — which is why he was the officer on that tour |
| Retired | October 2021, as a Captain, after 32 years |
| Elections | Republican nominee, Virginia’s 10th congressional district, 2022 (lost 53–47); Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, 2024 (lost 54–45) |
| Under Secretary | Nominated 28 February 2025; confirmed by the Senate 1 October 2025, 52–45; sworn in 3 October 2025 |
| Acting Secretary | From 22 April 2026 |
A man who arrived in the United States as a four-year-old refugee, enlisted at eighteen as a seaman recruit — the bottom of the Navy — and now runs the department. That is the arc, and it is the reason the tour landed the way it did on a room of people who spend their working lives telling children that effort compounds.
Why a dive school is the right room for school owners
It would be easy to file this under inspiration and move on. The more useful reading is technical, because a military dive school and a martial arts school are solving a version of the same problem.
Both teach a physical skill under stress to people who can be hurt doing it. Neither can teach it by explanation alone. Both depend on an instructor’s judgement about when a student is ready for the next thing, and both carry real consequences when that judgement is wrong. The difference is that the Navy has been forced to formalise what most martial arts schools leave to instinct.
The Navy treats attrition as a design question, not a personality question. When a student fails out of a hard course, the school asks what in the selection, the preparation or the sequencing produced that result. Most martial arts schools, faced with a student who quits at green belt, conclude that the student lacked commitment. One of those two organisations is learning something.
Standards are published, not implied. A diver knows precisely what he has to do to pass. A great many martial arts students do not know precisely what they have to do to earn the next rank, because the standard lives in the instructor’s head. Published standards are not bureaucracy; they are what makes a hard standard survivable, because the student can see the distance and measure it.
Instructors are selected and trained as instructors. In the military, being excellent at the skill does not qualify you to teach it — that is a separate qualification with its own course. In the martial arts the default assumption runs the other way: the best black belt in the room gets handed a class. It is the single most consequential difference between the two systems, and it is entirely fixable.
What a school owner should take from this. Not “be more like the military.” Most attempts at that produce a school that shouts more and teaches no better.
Take the three transferable pieces: publish the standard so the student can see it; treat every drop-out as information about your programme rather than about the student’s character; and make instructing a qualification in its own right, with its own training, rather than a reward for seniority.
The fourth one is harder and matters most. Cao’s own record — seaman recruit to the Naval Academy to command — is an argument that the ceiling people are assigned at the start is usually wrong. Every school owner reading this has a student who has been quietly written off by somebody. That is the part of the morning worth keeping.
The archive note
This account is drawn from the NAPMA members’ archive, a private site holding roughly 385 posts of recordings and meeting material from 2009 to 2016 that has never been publicly indexed. The Panama City meeting is documented there in six items: the commanding officer’s tour, session recordings in two parts, written and video testimonials published on 12 March 2015, and a video of Commander Cao’s address to an earlier graduating class, posted in February 2015.
This magazine is working through that archive and publishing what belongs in the industry’s public record. This is the first of those pieces.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Hung Cao?
Hung Cao, born in Saigon in 1971 and brought to the United States in 1975, is a retired U.S. Navy Captain who served 32 years in explosive ordnance disposal and salvage diving. He commanded the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center from September 2013 to June 2016, was confirmed as Under Secretary of the Navy on 1 October 2025, and became Acting Secretary of the Navy on 22 April 2026.
What is the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center?
NDSTC, at Naval Support Activity Panama City in Florida, is the United States military’s central school for divers. It trains divers for the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, covering scuba, surface-supplied and saturation diving as well as salvage work.
What can a martial arts school learn from military training?
Three things transfer directly: publishing the standard for each rank so students can measure their own distance to it; treating drop-outs as information about the programme rather than about the student’s character; and making instructor training a separate qualification rather than a reward for seniority. What does not transfer is volume and intimidation, which are the parts most often copied.
Sources
Primary sources: the Naval History and Heritage Command and U.S. Navy leadership biographies for Hung Cao’s career, command dates, confirmation and assumption of the acting secretaryship; the published record of the 2022 and 2024 Virginia campaigns; and the NAPMA members’ archive for the 2015 Panama City meeting, its tour of NDSTC, and the participant testimonial quoted above.
Dating. The members’ archive does not record the exact date of the meeting. Its testimonials were published on 12 March 2015 and the session video was posted in May 2015, so the meeting itself took place in the earlier part of 2015. We have said “early 2015” rather than invent a date. Commander Cao’s command of NDSTC ran from September 2013 to June 2016, which is consistent.
The testimonial is quoted from the member archive with the writer’s name and school as he gave them. His street address and telephone number appeared in the original and are deliberately not reproduced here.
Politics. Hung Cao’s two campaigns for elected office are reported because they are part of his public record. This journal does not endorse candidates and takes no position on them.
Corrections. See our editorial policy.
