SEA AIR SPACE 2025 — In his first major address to industry, Navy Secretary John Phelan promised to use his business acumen to break through the Navy’s “rigid adherence to the old way of doing things” that has led to “complacency, bureaucracy, and in some cases, sub-optimal policy.”
“We have to really change the way that we buy things. Change the way we make decisions. We have to be quicker,” he told attendees at the Sea Air Space Exposition today.
The new secretary was confirmed by the Senate last month and spent the first weeks in the job touring facilities at Quonset Point, R.I., and Groton, Conn. Hung Cao, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be under secretary of the Navy, is awaiting Senate confirmation.
Phelan, whose background is in private investment, is a relative unknown to the Navy community and its industrial base. Today’s speech was his first major address to industry in Washington, DC, beyond his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation.
Interlaced with occasional jokes about underestimating the complexity of the job he’s taken on as well as references to historical Navy icons like Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, Phelan focused mostly on using his business background to reform the Navy’s own way of doing business. He said he was at the early stages of reviewing the service’s current contracts and plans to bring a “huge focus” to acquisition and procurement strategies.
“As the former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Zumwalt once stated, ‘I don’t give a damn where an idea comes from, all I care about it whether it works or not,'” Phelan said.”That’s the approach I’m bringing to this office.”
Phelan said one example of questionable procurement is seeing the state of a barracks and comparing it to a hotel he previously built for what he described as significantly less. “That [hotel] has some marble and that has some pretty nice things in it. I’m trying to understand how we can get to those numbers,” he said.
In Sea Air Space, Phelan’s audience was a who’s who of the Navy community. Among those in the audience were active duty and retired admirals, former chiefs of naval operations and shipbuilding executives from many of the public and private shipyards Phelan promised he’d visit in the coming weeks.
Perhaps in a nod to some of those in uniform sitting just a few feet away, when asked about his plans for rectifying shipbuilding and maintenance delays, Phelan joked the questioner should “ask all the admirals,” before adding he is still new to the job.
Corrected 4/15/2025 at 11:17 am ET: The original version of this story incorrectly identified dollar values associated with Phelan’s comments about the Navy’s barracks.
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