SECNAVY Phelan: First Person Spoken Word
don't guess where he wants to go--let him tell you himself
Get a fresh cup of coffee.
Put the phone direct to voicemail.
Close the door.
On this week’s Midrats, we heard what one of our few naval officers in the Senate, Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), had to say about future reform of our military. Yesterday we had some ideas on how to reform DOD from Gary Anderson, Col, USMC, (Ret.).
Keeping in line with hearing from people first-person, I’d like to invite you to watch the below to hear from the new Secretary of the Navy himself what direction he sees our Navy and Marine Corps needing to go.
If you can’t watch the video below of SECNAV’s Keynote Speech from Sea, Air, Space 2025, I’ve enlisted AI to create a transcript you can find under the video.
Transcript below:
Wow, big audience. Good morning everyone.
It's a privilege to stand before you today as the 79th Secretary of the Navy. Serving in this role for President Trump and our nation is the honor of a lifetime. The President understands the critical importance of reviving the maritime industrial base, and we both know that a strong Navy and Marine Corps means a strong America.
I come from a business background, so some of you might be wondering—how did I end up here? Well, I tend to like very complex problems. And now, on the 14th day of the job, I can tell you—I may have underestimated just how complex this one would be.
As everyone in the room knows, leading the Department of the Navy is anything but easy. But I didn’t come here for easy—I came here to solve problems. As the former Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Zumwalt, once stated: “I don’t give a damn where an idea comes from. All I care about is whether it works or not.” That’s the approach I’m bringing to this office.
I’ve spent my entire life leading and building teams, studying and investing in businesses, tackling tough problems, and turning challenges into opportunities. In my old business, a sixteenth of a penny is meaningful, and acting in a timely manner with incomplete information is the difference between success or failure. You get a scorecard every day, and at the end of the year, you get your annual performance report—and you either get to celebrate victory or accept defeat.
Victory means growing and flourishing. Defeat means downsizing and personnel change. That kind of continual performance pressure teaches you how to be decisive, stay calm through chaos, and lead through uncertainty.
This is why the mission of the Navy and the Marine Corps resonates with me. I understand what every great warrior knows—nothing worthwhile comes easy. It takes hard work. Throughout my career, I’ve learned that success isn’t handed to you—it’s earned.
As the winningest sports team in history, the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team say, their motto is: “Champions do extra.” That same ethos defines our Navy and Marine Corps.
For decades, we’ve enjoyed the benefit of being the world’s preeminent naval power. The good news is, the Department of the Navy has good options and great assets. However, we’re at a point where it needs a greater sense of urgency to address its problems.
Our success and rigid adherence to the old way of doing things have led to complacency, bureaucracy, and in some cases, suboptimal policy. This has slowed us down—and that puts our sailors and marines at risk. And that is not right.
While we’ve been mired in bureaucratic inertia, budgetary gridlock in Congress, and chronic shortfalls in shipbuilding investment, our adversaries have been building—and getting better.
China constructed more ships last year alone than we have since World War II. China is not interested in being number two. They are attempting to dominate the seas—and beyond that, the global order. Our competitors are not waiting for us to get our act together. They see weakness—and they will try to exploit it.
That ends now.
Here’s the truth: America is not weak. Together, with your support, our Navy and Marine Corps will remain the most formidable, adaptable, and ready global force the world has seen. Our mission is clear: to protect the United States, safeguard our allies, and ensure peace through strength.
As the Constitution states, we must “raise and support armies” when needed, but we must “provide and maintain a navy” at all times. Why do you think the Founding Fathers mandated this? Because they knew—building a navy takes time. And those who control the sea lead the world order.
My number one priority as SecNav is readiness. I wake up every day focused on our readiness—our ability to fight—and our modernization strategy going forward. To ensure we remain at our peak readiness, I will focus on three areas:
Strengthening shipbuilding and the maritime industrial base
Fostering an adaptive, accountable, and warfighting culture
The health, welfare, and training of our people—our sailors, marines, and their families
In the coming weeks, I will review our acquisition systems and identify how we can streamline and reform them. I will work across the department and especially with industry to find solutions. We will restore and maintain operational readiness and fiscal responsibility.
In order to do so, I will rely on the experience and insight of the people around me. I am not interested in echo chambers—I want honest perspectives and real results. General Patton once said: “If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn’t thinking.” As Secretary of the Navy, I intend to keep this mindset front and center.
Today, we are at a critical juncture in our naval strategy. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have long been the cornerstone of global security. But rising costs, shifting requirements, and years of underinvestment in shipbuilding have left us vulnerable.
Underinvestment in workforce and manufacturing capacity, gold-plated requirements, and bureaucratic decision-making have all led to huge cost overruns, extremely late deliveries, and delayed maintenance. This is unacceptable.
Fixing this requires a whole-of-government and industry approach, and public-private partnerships where one plus one equals three. We will be moving to a philosophy of more shared risk with the industry.
The gap between our naval requirements and the capacity of our fleet to meet them is growing. Every missed milestone in shipbuilding and maintenance is a risk to our national security.
The need to rebuild and modernize our fleet is now more urgent than ever—and has become, in my mind, a national emergency.
President Trump has expressed strong support for expanding and revitalizing our naval shipbuilding. He has stated to me many times: “Shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding. Get those ships out of the maintenance yards—and fix the damn rust.” He does not like it—and I don’t like getting calls in the middle of the night.
His mandate is to enhance the Navy’s strength and ensure America’s dominance at sea. We must ensure that every decision we make regarding ship construction, maintenance, and upgrades is one that keeps us ahead of our adversaries.
A winning team doesn’t just throw money at problems—it fixes them. Execution demands accountability and adapts to changing conditions. We must do the same.
We will set realistic, achievable schedules—and we will commit to them. We will eliminate the waste and inefficiencies that drain resources without delivering results. We will demand accountability from our shipbuilding enterprise—because every dollar, every day, and every decision counts.
To avoid repeating mistakes of poorly executed programs, we will work closely with the shipbuilding industry to calculate risk more effectively and ensure that every dollar spent on defense leads to tangible, measurable results.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
This requires us to reassess how we evaluate and manage risk at every stage of the shipbuilding process—from design to delivery. The Department of the Navy cannot tackle these challenges alone.
Collaboration with industry is essential to drive the improvements we need. I look forward to building a new and more open relationship with our maritime industry. Together, we will build more than ships—we will build trust, transparency, and mutual understanding.
The Department of the Navy will work alongside the industrial base to develop and implement better KPIs and more robust risk analysis, which will allow us to identify and mitigate roadblocks or bottlenecks quicker.
By building collaborative relationships, we can set more realistic schedules, develop better forecasting tools, and ensure that resources are allocated more efficiently.
Our goal is to accelerate the shipbuilding process—without compromising quality or capability. With a concerted team effort between the Department of the Navy and industry, we can streamline construction timelines, improve workforce readiness, and maintain the operational superiority of our fleet.
This effort will require hard work, discipline, and accountability across the entire shipbuilding enterprise.
Ultimately, this is about our national security—and, candidly, our way of life.
Freedom is not free, and neither is a great Navy. My goal is to build a more agile, efficient, and forward-thinking Department of the Navy that can defend the nation well into the next century.
My second priority is to bring back the warrior ethos by fostering an adaptive and accountable culture focused on warfighting. I understand the Navy has its own ways of doing things—steeped in tradition and often inflexible. Those ways, even when dysfunctional, must be confronted daily and relentlessly in order to change them. They have to be challenged by senior leadership, or the inertia of the organization becomes immovable, and we will stagnate and fail.
A strong military starts with world-class people who have a clear sense of purpose and mission. And we have that. When our people are driven by mission, the organization thrives. In my experience, it's about building workplaces where great work happens—a culture that values people over processes, quality over quantity, and results over effort. When we embrace this, everyone wins.
For generations, our warfighters have been the embodiment of resilience, adaptability, and raw determination. However, our success has bred complacency in some areas. As one surface warfare commander bluntly stated in a 2021 Navy report: the Navy treats warfighting readiness as a compliance issue. You might even use the term "compliance-centered warfare." Sailors in the same survey described a careerist culture with a zero-defect mindset. We cannot let this environment take hold.
Reforming entrenched organizations is never easy. Change is not easy. But in warfare, failure to adapt is fatal. We must relentlessly improve how we train, fight, and lead. We must challenge ourselves—individually and as a force—to push beyond what’s comfortable and familiar. Growth comes from questioning the status quo, from being willing to look critically at how we operate and asking if there’s a better, more efficient, or more effective way to achieve our objectives.
This mindset is essential for our continued dominance on the world stage. I’ve seen firsthand how organizations can atrophy if they fail to adapt or innovate. I’ve also seen what happens when successful businesses become risk-averse or fall into what I call—putting it in a nice way—the "don’t mess it up" mindset. When institutions become too rigid or too set in their ways, they lose the ability to respond, adapt, and succeed.
In many organizations, when someone brings up a different way of doing things—many times a better way—the response has been: “Well, that’s not how we do it.” This is a fatal attitude to high-performing organizations.
Phrases like “this is how we’ve always done it” can be dual-edged swords. There’s great value in stability, tradition, order, and a consistent way of doing things—that we must respect and appreciate. But when those things stifle adaptability, innovation, collaboration, and trust, they can erode a team’s ability to win in a dynamic and challenging environment. And I can think of no environment more dynamic and challenging than combat or warfare.
My goal is to streamline decision-making by trusting our people, giving our leaders the ability to act, take intelligent and calculated risks, and keep us moving forward. Because the warrior ethos is not just about fighting. As Secretary Hicks has stated, it’s about learning, adapting, and leading the charge in new and uncharted territories.
My third area of focus is the health, welfare, and training of our people. People and their families are the foundation of our Navy and Marine Corps team. Every mission we execute, every challenge we face, and every victory we achieve begins with the strength and resilience of our people.
If we are to remain the most capable fighting force in the world, we must take care of those who serve—and also those who support them. That includes our shipbuilders.
Last week, I toured the shipbuilding facilities in Quonset Point and Groton. The men and women whose hands are shaping our fleet—I sat down with a number of shipyard trade workers, and I was moved by their enthusiasm, expertise, and desire to improve. Their dedication to the mission was really impressive. I said to them: You aren't just building ships. You’re contributing to our national security—and the President and I thank you for that.
In my view, investing in people is as critical to our success as any weapons system or warfighting strategy. We are facing a serious shortage in our shipbuilding workforce, which is stressing our deployment schedules and exacerbating the strain on our current forces. This leads to extended deployments, overstretched crews, and increased burnout. These challenges are not hypothetical—they affect the lives of our Sailors, Marines, and their families, who feel the weight of these pressures every day.
The Department of the Navy, working closely with industry, must offer a clear vision for the future of our shipbuilding workforce—one that includes career growth, competitive compensation, and a strong sense of purpose. This means setting a clear focus on training, retaining, and upskilling our workforce. More mentoring and on-the-job training are essential to building the skills we need. And we must start early.
In my opinion, we spent the last decade teaching people how to code. In the next decade, we’ll be teaching people how to use their hands. This will become a critical and necessary workforce skill. We will work with local communities and those in education to introduce students to high-skilled trades like welding, fabrication, and engineering—ensuring the next generation is prepared for long-term success.
At the end of the day, all of this is about readiness. Every person we recruit, train, and retain is an investment in our future. And our future depends on the strength, skills, and spirit of the American people who choose to serve our nation.
In closing, I intend to bring a huge focus to the Department of the Navy’s procurement and acquisition strategy. I’ll use the word relentless again. I will ensure we receive the appropriate, risk-adjusted rate of return on our investments. In many ways, warfare is like a business. Our military must operate at optimal efficiency—maximizing its resources to ensure that every American tax dollar spent delivers results that strengthen our defense.
The Navy and Marine Corps are filled with exceptional talent. As I see it, my role is to harness that talent by challenging the status quo and implementing decisions that ensure our military remains the most powerful and lethal fighting force in the world.
Change is coming. And my responsibility is to make sure we have the right people, in the right seats, on the right platforms. There will be a new level of accountability and performance based on merit. I welcome those who welcome change and are prepared to do extra.
To our service members, congressional and industry leaders: thank you for your service, your insights, and your unwavering support of our mission. Together, we will ensure that the Department of the Navy remains the most formidable maritime force the world has ever known—for the next 250 years and beyond.
Thank you. It’s now time for me to get to work. Appreciate your time.
Great presentation, with so many important points of emphasis. This one I particularly like: "In my opinion, we spent the last decade teaching people how to code. In the next decade, we’ll be teaching people how to use their hands. "
He sounds good and seems to have an idea where we need to go. But, talk is cheap. Let's see what he does. Semper Fi.