Washington: News that the now-former US Navy Secretary John Phelan had been unceremoniously sacked spread like wildfire through Christopher Pyne’s annual AUKUS conference in Washington.
Many attendees at the defence lobbyist’s $5000-a-head summit did not yet know about the ousting when they arrived for an exclusive dinner at the Cosmos Club on Wednesday evening (US time).
Australian Navy chief Mark Hammond, who in July will become chief of the Australian Defence Force, had met Phelan earlier in the day, along with US Indo-Pacific Commander Sam Paparo.
It appeared the US Navy boss had no idea he was about to be made to walk the plank.
Still, it was not entirely unexpected. One well-placed US source indicated Phelan’s dismissal had been a long time coming, such was the animosity between him and the top dogs at the Pentagon and the White House.
That was evident in the way it played out. Just 24 hours earlier, Phelan delivered a keynote luncheon address at the US Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference, the premier event of its kind, where he detailed his agenda.
“Time is our most valuable asset. It is the one thing we cannot get back, and we will not waste it,” he concluded. If only he knew then how little he had.
Phelan also briefed reporters, met top congressional leaders about the navy’s budget request and the head of the Singaporean Navy, as well as posted publicly on X about his agenda and Donald Trump’s “historic” naval budget request. Hours later, he was gone.
The Pentagon did little to defend him on the way out. Phelan was departing the administration “effective immediately”, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said. “We wish him well in his future endeavours.”
The New York Times reported that one of the issues between Phelan and Deputy Defence Secretary Stephen Feinberg was naval shipbuilding – a matter of acute interest to Australia, given the AUKUS pact relies on the US dramatically increasing its production of Virginia-class submarines.
That stands to reason because one of the Pentagon’s recent acts was to promote Vice Admiral Robert Gaucher into a senior role – reporting directly to Feinberg – that assumes responsibility for submarine construction.
Phelan was seated at the table in the White House cabinet room during Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s meeting with Trump in October, when the US president said AUKUS was “full steam ahead”.
It was Phelan who provided the only respite from the love-in, noting that while AUKUS was moving ahead, there were still some “ambiguities” to sort out.
According to one well-placed American source, Trump later instructed Phelan to just get on with it: there were to be no more reviews, and no more delays.
As a political appointee, Phelan was Trump’s man. He had no naval or even military experience: he was a finance guy who managed money for Dell billionaire Michael Dell, another friend of Trump. He also raised millions for Trump’s campaign and collected art.
His replacement, Hung Cao, is a long-serving Navy officer who unsuccessfully ran for political office and was appointed by Trump to a role in the Pentagon bureaucracy.
He is described as a hardliner who, during a 2024 debate with Democratic senator Tim Kaine, said the Navy needed “alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds”.
Some saw Phelan’s openness to outsourcing parts of American shipbuilding as his downfall. Hunter Stires, who was maritime strategist to president Joe Biden’s navy secretary Carlos Del Toro, said Phelan committed “a grave strategic, as well as political, error” by signalling his receptiveness to such a proposition during his speech at this week’s US Navy League conference.
“Phelan’s firing within hours of his blunder should be read as a stark and welcome signal that outsourcing US naval construction abroad is and must remain a non-starter,” said Stires, who is now a fellow at the Centre for Maritime Strategy.
Back at Pyne’s AUKUS dinner, no speakers mentioned the elephant in the room, nor reflected on the fact that Australia’s prime ally had sacked its navy boss in the middle of a war and naval blockade.
And why should they, really? It’s just another day in the Trump administration.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
