President Trump did not pick a consultant. He did not pick a donor with a yacht and a PowerPoint. On Tuesday he nominated Hung Cao, the acting secretary who has already been running the Department of the Navy since April, and he called him what the last decade of Pentagon fashion tried to unlearn.
I am pleased to nominate a true WARRIOR, Hung Cao, to become the next Secretary of the Navy. We need Patriots like Hung leading our Navy and Marine Corps, and I can think of no one better than him to make sure our Great Navy and Marine Corps remain the FIERCEST and BEST Force the World has ever seen. The Senate needs to confirm this Warfighter, ASAP, so he can continue the fantastic work he has been doing over the past 4 months.
Cao answered the only way a sailor should. “It’s an honor of a lifetime to lead the great warriors of the Navy and Marine Corps team,” he wrote. “I’m grateful for your leadership and support as we continue to get after shipbuilding and ensure the defense of the homeland.”
That is the whole argument. Ships. Homeland. Warfighters. Not a lecture about climate as a national-security threat and not another round of identity training on a carrier that is supposed to be hunting mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
From Saigon to Annapolis
Hung Cao was born in Saigon in 1971. After the fall in 1975 his family fled communism and landed in America, then spent years in West Africa before he returned to Northern Virginia at twelve. He enlisted as a seaman recruit in 1989. The Naval Academy commissioned him in 1996. He became a Navy diver and explosive ordnance disposal officer, the kind of work that happens in dark water with a bomb that does not care about your feelings.
He deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. In 1999 he led salvage work that recovered the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette, and Lauren Bessette after their plane went down off Martha’s Vineyard. He retired a captain in 2021. Then Virginia Democrats beat him twice, first for the House in 2022 and then for the Senate against Tim Kaine in 2024, even with Trump stumping for him in the Eden Center. The voters of Northern Virginia kept their senator. The country got a better use for the man they passed over.
The Senate already knew who he was. It confirmed him as under secretary in October 2025 by a 52-45 vote. Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to sit it out. On April 22 he became acting secretary after John Phelan was pushed out amid the fight over shipbuilding speed. Phelan was a businessman. Cao had spent a career in the water.
The Warrior Ethos Comes Back Aboard
Four months is not a trial balloon. It is a record. Cao has been driving the administration’s Golden Fleet push, the attempt to rebuild yards and hulls after years of late ships, bloated programs, and a fleet that shrank while China laid keels. He has also done the unfashionable work the last administration treated as a moral stain. The Department of the Navy has been restoring careers, correcting records, and paying back the sailors and Marines who were thrown out over the Biden COVID mandate. Cao put it in plain language. “To the sailors and marines who were wrongfully discharged during COVID, we failed you. We will never allow this to happen again, not on my watch.”
That is not branding. That is repentance with a signature block.
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He has the same allergy to ritual panic. After a Blue Angels jet flew low over Pensacola Beach in July and sent chairs and umbrellas flying, the usual chorus demanded a scalp. Cao posted the debrief. “No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom.” Pete Hegseth piled on. The flyovers will continue until morale improves. The professional scolds called it dangerous. A country that cannot stand the sound of its own jets has already started losing the next war.
Legacy outlets framed the nomination as another Pentagon “purge” next to Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation and a long Abraham Lincoln deployment in the Iran fight. They always do. What they will not say is that the last team spent years sanding the sharp edges off the force and then acted shocked when readiness reports turned ugly. A refugee who watched Saigon fall does not need a seminar on why a navy exists.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.
Confirm him. Let the man who crawled through wreckage and wire keep building the fleet that has to meet the next one. The Senate already voted for him once. Doing it again should not require a prayer breakfast and a six-month stall.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
