From Laffey to Mabus: How Ship Naming Went Wrong

It is a common misperception—not only among the public, but even within the military—that the naming of ships and submarines is a routine and apolitical exercise. Aircraft carriers are named after presidents. Battleships were named after states. Destroyers are named after warriors. To a certain extent, this is true. Nevertheless, virtually every class of warship contains its naming outliers, and many of those exceptions reflect opportunities taken to honor elected or appointed political figures.

It is sensible to wonder how the ships and submarines of the United States Navy receive their names. The simple answer is that the Secretary of the Navy makes the decision. There is no nomination process, no formal colloquy, and no voting—the Secretary of the Navy determines the name of each ship. Historically, this process has been guided primarily by tradition and convention, though sometimes things have taken curious turns.

The attack submarine force provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how these conventions evolved—and eventually drifted. Early American submarines carried experimental or designer-associated names but beginning with USS Pike (SS-6) in 1903, submarines settled into an extraordinarily durable naming system. For roughly seventy years, with two minor exceptions, every American attack submarine, whether diesel-electric or nuclear-powered, carried the name of a fish, shark, or other sea creature.

The convention became so deeply rooted that it survived multiple generations of technological revolution. The great fleet boats of the Second World War adhered to it rigidly. The famous Gato-class, which formed the backbone of the Navy’s Pacific submarine campaign, followed the pattern without exception. The same remained true into the nuclear age. Even when the Navy commissioned revolutionary vessels such as USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, or USS Triton, the names still reflected maritime mythology and the sea itself.

The first meaningful breach in the attack boat naming convention came only after Vietnam. During the early 1970s, Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee began inserting the names of influential congressmen into the otherwise fish-named Sturgeon-class attack submarines. Thus, alongside boats such as Hammerhead, Seahorse and Archerfish appeared USS William H. Bates—the first boat named after a congressman—followed in short order by USS L. Mendel Rivers, USS Glenard P. Lipscomb, and USS Richard B. Russell.

These congressmen strongly supported naval appropriations and the nuclear Navy during the Cold War, but their inclusion marked a departure from the older naming logic.

As Navy lore has it, Admiral Hyman Rickover explained the shift succinctly: “Fish don’t vote.” Apocryphal or not, the remark captured the emerging reality. Cities vote. States vote. Senators vote. Fish do not.

In an odd historical twist, Chafee’s own family later became entangled in the same naming culture he had helped normalize. Chafee himself eventually became a senator from Rhode Island, and his son, John L. Chafee, later followed him into the Senate. In 2002, Secretary of the Navy Gordon England named USS Chafee (DDG-90) after the younger Chafee rather than his father.

This decision remains curious. John L. Chafee supported the Navy while in office, but he was no Mendel Rivers, nor in the class of Glenard Lipscomb, whose congressional advocacy proved central to Cold War naval expansion and nuclear propulsion funding. John H. Chafee, by contrast, had served as Secretary of the Navy, United States senator, and combat Marine officer. Yet it was the son, not the father, whose name ultimately appeared on a warship.

As for England, he has never elaborated on the logic of his decision to honor the son rather than the father, and his decision remains a curiosity.

As the decades passed, submarine naming drifted still further from its original coherence. The Los Angeles-class abandoned fish names entirely and adopted city names and the class included the first and only boat, of any type, ever to honor a naval officer—USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN-709), named after the “Father of the Nuclear Navy.”

As for the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBN), their naming was less consistent, beginning with the first SSBN class—the George Washington class, the lead boat of which, USS George Washington (SSBN-598), was commissioned in 1959. The 41 SSBNs. commissioned in multiple classes, between 1959 and 1981were all putatively named after prominent American presidents, Founding Fathers, Revolutionary War figures, and major national statesmen. This is not to say that there were not a universe of curious outliers, including boats named Robert E. Lee, Thomas A. Edison, Tecumseh (the Native American Shawnee leader), Von Steuben (the Prussian officer who aided the Americans during the Revolutionary War), Simon Bolivar (South American independence leader), Kamehameha (the Hawaiian monarch), and Will Rogers (the entertainer).

The Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines then shifted toward states, and a return to consistency, replacing the older presidential naming conventions associated with earlier SSBN classes. Yet even here exceptions remained. USS Henry M. Jackson honored “Scoop” Jackson, the influential senator from Washington who became one of the most important political advocates of the Cold War military establishment.

In recent years, the Virginia-class attack submarines continued the state convention, following the completion of the Ohio-class SSBN, but not completely. USS John Warner honors a senator, while there is a second USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN-795) included. Upcoming boats in the class also include several interesting names, including USS Arizona, which will revive a state name absent since the loss of BB-39 at Pearl Harbor, along with USS Tang and USS Wahoo which resurrect famous World War II submarine—and fish—names.

Individually defensible, these decisions nevertheless reflected the erosion of a coherent naming system.

In the case of the Navy’s battleships, there have been 59 commissioned, from the days of the pre-dreadnought battleships of the 1890s to the final class of fast battleships, the Iowa-class. Each was named after a U.S. state. The single exception to the otherwise strict convention was USS Kearsarge (BB-5), commissioned in 1900 and named after the Civil War-era sloop-of-war USS Kearsarge. Of course, this happened at a time when ship naming conventions were still evolving and not yet fully standardized by type.

In fact, the convention became so consistent that several state names were used more than once, including Indiana, Massachusetts, Iowa, Alabama, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Idaho. Having said that, no battleship was ever named for Hawaii or Alaska, as both became states after the battleship era had effectively ended.

Only one state remained conspicuously absent: Montana.

Montana was intended to become the lead ship of the final American battleship class. Those ships, however, were cancelled in 1943 as naval aviation rendered the battleship strategically obsolete. Midway and the Coral Sea demonstrated that aircraft carriers, not battleships, had become the decisive capital ships of modern naval warfare. A carrier task force could strike hundreds of miles away, while even the most powerful battleship remained confined to the horizon.

Thus, Mississippi eventually received multiple battleships, a nuclear-powered cruiser, a submarine, and two senators memorialized in steel, while Montana waited nearly eighty years before USS Montana (SSN-794) finally entered service in 2022.

This naturally raises the question of what Mississippi has done right, and what Montana has done wrong, at least in the eyes of successive Secretaries of the Navy.

Similarly, the gun cruisers of the Navy past have been remarkably consistent. Between 1914 and 1918, 98 cruisers of all classes, including light cruisers (CL), heavy cruisers (CA), large cruisers (CB), anti-aircraft/light cruiser variants, and postwar gun cruisers, were commissioned, and every one was named after an American city. That is, except for four, which were nevertheless named after geographic points. First, there was the USS Canberra (CA-70) of the Baltimore-class. Commissioned in 1943, she was named in honor of Australia following the loss of the Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra during the Battle of Savo Island. Otherwise, there were the two ships of the Alaska-class of large cruisers. USS Alaska (CB-1) and USS Guam (CB-2) were both named after what were at the time U.S. territories.

With one exception—the single-ship USS Long Beach (CGN-9)—the Navy’s tradition of naming cruisers after cities effectively ended in 1961. Instead of building new gun cruisers, the Navy shifted to guided-missile frigates/destroyer leaders (DLGs), missile-armed surface combatants designed to counter the Soviet anti-ship missile threat. In practice, these ships filled the cruiser role even if they carried a different designation.

Most DLGs built between 1960 and 1975 were named for notable naval officers, including the Leahy-class, Belknap-class, and Farragut-class. Nuclear-powered DLGNs largely followed the same pattern, though the two ships of the California-class of DLGs briefly revived state names, inheriting part of the battleship prestige tradition.

Yet political exceptions continued to creep into the system. USS Josephus Daniels (CG-27) of the Belknap-class of cruisers honored Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy, remembered in equal measure for naval expansion and for banning alcohol aboard ships. One presumes that this specific decision was ignored when the increasingly trend-setting Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee chose to honor him in the early 1970s. One may also correctly presume that every crew member of Josephus Daniels viewed the named secretary, though not the ship, with frank disdain.

Then, on 30 June 1975, the Navy abandoned the confusing DLG designation and redesignated nearly all of these ships as cruisers (CG/CGN), formally restoring the cruiser classification for the missile era.

Ships commissioned as cruisers returned with the four state-named CGNs of the Virginia-class (which included USS Mississippi (CGN-4) beginning in 1976. This was followed by the last cruiser class, the Ticonderoga-class.  In that class, each ship was named after a famous battle, with again a single outlier. USS Ticonderoga (CG-47), commissioned on January 22, 1983, followed by USS Yorktown, USS Vincennes, USS Valley Forge…USS Thomas S. Gates (CG-551) …SS Bunker Hill, USS Mobile Bay, and so on up to and including USS Port Royal (CG-73), commissioned on July 9, 1994.

As was the case with Josephus Daniels, Thomas S. Gates was Secretary of the Navy. He was also Secretary of Defense. However, his total tenure in the administration of President Eisenhower lasted from 1957 to 1961, totaling 3 years and 10 months of peacetime, and arguably unremarkable, service.

On a personal note, I was the captain of USS Thomas S. Gates (CG-51), and the name of the ship was considered to be so dissonant, especially in comparison to ships carrying names like Antietam, Normandy, and Chosin, that every arriving commanding officer found himself asking exactly how the ship got its name. The story passed down from captain to captain was that John F. Lehman Jr., a Secretary of the Navy known for his aggressive decision-making, attended the funeral of Secretary Gates. Lehman, like Gates, was the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, and it is said that at the funeral he was approached by Gates’s widow, Frances, who implored Lehman to name an appropriate ship after her husband.

Whether this story is true or not cannot be verified without the sworn testimony of John Lehman, and he is not talking. As is the case with Secretary Gordon, or for that matter any other Secretary, Lehman has absolutely no interest in discussing his more inexplicable decisions on the record. However, it goes to show how—unfortunately—politics and even accidental meetings can affect the naming of ships and submarines.

Since 1975, 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers have been placed in commission. Mostly, these have been named for presidents, in evident replacement of the SSBNs which were often named after presidents prior to the Ohio-class. However, as was the case with the SSBNs, not all carriers in the Nimitz and Gerald R. Ford-class are named for presidents. USS Nimitz (CVN-68) was named after arguably the greatest U.S. Navy admiral to ever serve. Additionally, two congressmen have earned the honor of having their names attached to the apex predator of the world’s oceans: Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia (CVN-70) and the aforementioned Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi. Still, seven of ten Nimitz-class CVNs are named for presidents.

In the Gerald R. Ford-class, however, the mostly presidential naming rubric appears to be breaking down. Yes, there is USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), and the next ship of the class, still under construction, is named USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), but after that, things change. Oddly, it seems as if we’ve run out of presidents, as this is the second aircraft carrier to be named after President Kennedy. The first ship (CV-67) was in commission from September 1968 to March 2007. A second John F. Kennedy? There is no aircraft carrier named USS Jimmy Carter (though there is a submarine, SSN-23, named after him), nor one named after Lyndon B. Johnson (though there is a guided-missile destroyer, DDG-1002, named after him). Also, there has never been any ship, of any description, named after Richard M. Nixon. In any event, as with the state of Mississippi, one cannot help but wonder at the Navy’s evident preoccupation with President Kennedy, notwithstanding his presidency and his entirely legitimate and honorable service commanding PT-109 during the Second World War.

After these two presidents will come USS Enterprise (CVN-80), now under construction. Enterprise represents another tradition: naming a ship after a renowned warship of the past. The next Enterprise will be the ninth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name, and that list includes the legendary “Big E,” USS Enterprise (CV-6) of World War II. The Big E” was the most decorated U.S. Navy ship of the war and participated in nearly every major carrier battle in the Pacific theater, so the name choice does make sense. Still, the last nuclear-powered aircraft carrier named Enterprise—which was also the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (CVN-65)—was only decommissioned in 2012.

In January 2020, Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas B. Modly announced the naming of the fourth planned Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Modly selected Doris “Dorie” Miller—an enlisted Medal of Honor recipient—as the namesake for USS Doris Miller (CVN-81). While Miller is unquestionably a bona fide hero, the decision underscored how far carrier naming has broadened beyond its traditional, albeit recent, presidential focus.

Having said that, an evident return to presidential naming normality is returning with planned carriers, USS William J. Clinton (CVN-82), and USS George W. Bush (CVN-83)

This brings us to the current president, Donald J. Trump. Evidently, President Trump is in no mood to wait—perhaps for decades—while future CVNs are named after Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and perhaps yet another John F. Kennedy. Instead, following a precedent that stretches back to 1799, Trump is personally pushing for the construction of a new class of guided missile battleship, ostensibly known as the “Trump-class,” though anomalously, the lead ship is advertised to be named USS Defiant (BBG-1).

Still, the very fact that such discussion now occurs openly illustrates how thoroughly warship naming has become intertwined with political identity and personal legacy.

Smaller combatants once reflected similarly coherent patterns, but modern destroyer naming has become a kind of institutional catch-all. The Arleigh Burke-class began as a relatively straightforward convention honoring naval heroes. Over time, however, the class became an expansive catalog of senators, secretaries, aviators, political patrons, nurses, and occasionally foreign statesmen.

There are ships named after Secretaries of the Navy, including USS Paul Hamilton, USS Nitze, and USS Paul Ignatius. There are ships named after senators, including USS Chafee (after the son) and planned destroyers honoring Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Richard Lugar, Sam Nunn, and Ted Stevens.

There is also USS Hopper (DDG-70), named after Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was neither a politician nor a traditional naval warfighter, having pioneered early computer programming languages. Also, there is USS Daniel Inouye, named after a Medal of Honor recipient from the Army, though he was also a U.S. senator who strongly supported fleet basing in his home state of Hawaii. There is USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81), named after British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. There is also USS Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG-123), named after Navy nurse Lenah Higbee, who became Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps in 1911. Though Higbee never served overseas, this is the second combat ship named in her honor. And in the process of being built is USS Quentin Walsh (DDG-132), named after a Coast Guard captain famous for an Army raid during World War II.

Individually, many of these names are defensible. Collectively, however, they reveal something larger. The naming system no longer operates according to a stable institutional logic. Increasingly, the exceptions themselves have become the convention.

With all this naming, one might reasonably assume that every major naval hero has already received appropriate commemoration. That assumption would be incorrect.

Chief Boatswain’s Mate Edwin J. Hill, USN, was a Medal of Honor recipient who served aboard USS Nevada (BB-36) on December 7, 1941. During the height of the strafing and bombing, Chief Boatswain Hill led his line-handling detail to the quays, cast off the ship’s lines, and swam back to his vessel. Later, while on the forecastle attempting to release the anchors, he was blown overboard and killed by the explosion of several bombs. There is not, nor has there ever been, a ship named Edwin J. Hill.

Then there is the captain of the submarine USS Growler (SS-215), Howard W. Gilmore, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the boat’s fifth war patrol in 1943. Mortally wounded while on the bridge during a surface engagement and unable to return inside the hull, he reportedly ordered, “Take her down,” allowing the submarine to escape while he remained outside. This act has become one of the most iconic examples of sacrifice in U.S. Navy history. USS Howard W. Gilmore (AS-16), a submarine tender commissioned in 1944, was named in his honor, but it was not a warship, and since the decommissioning of AS-16 in 1980—now more than four decades ago—the Navy has not assigned his name to an active ship.

Meanwhile, there have now been two combatants named for Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee.

Similarly, the legacy of the original “Six Frigates” of the United States Navy has been only intermittently preserved. Constitution survives because she remains technically in commission. Constellation briefly reappeared in the carrier force. But where are United States, Chesapeake, Congress, and President?

The imbalance becomes more glaring still when one considers ships such as USS Laffey.

The first USS Laffey (DD-459) was sunk in November 1942 following a point-blank nighttime gun duel off Guadalcanal with Japanese ships, including the battleship Kirishima.

As for the second Laffey (DD-724), she was named in honor of the first. On April 16, 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, she was stationed on radar picket duty north of the island when she came under one of the most intense kamikaze attacks of the Pacific War. Over the course of roughly eighty minutes, repeated waves of enemy aircraft struck the ship despite heavy antiaircraft fire and supporting American fighters. At least six kamikaze aircraft and multiple bombs hit the destroyer, causing catastrophic damage, widespread fires, and the deaths of thirty-two sailors, with many more wounded. Even after sustaining severe structural damage, the crew continued to fight, contained the fires, repaired critical systems, and kept the ship afloat, earning USS Laffey a lasting reputation as “The Ship That Would Not Die” and the award of the Presidential Unit Citation.

No modern warship bears the name Laffey.

Since 1960, there has not been a warship named after Sergeant Major Dan Daly, the legendary Marine, and winner of two separate Medals of Honor for two distinct acts of valor. There has never been a ship named after Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronaut tragically killed in Apollo 1.

Yet the Navy plans to build a destroyer named after former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

That contrast illustrates the larger problem more effectively than any abstract argument possibly could.

The tendency toward overt political signaling became unmistakable during the Obama administration, particularly under Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

Among Mabus’s more visible naming decisions was USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10), inexplicably named after the Arizona congresswoman following the assassination attempt against her. This choice is viewed by many as more of a comment on gun control than Congressman Giffords’ importance. More consequentially, however, Mabus fundamentally transformed the naming logic associated with the John Lewis-class replenishment oilers.

Historically, fleet oilers and auxiliary ships generally followed recognizable institutional naming categories. Rivers, explorers, geographic features, and naval support themes predominated. Under Mabus, however, the naming structure shifted sharply toward modern political and social figures.

Under Mabus, choices for this class include USNS John Lewis, USNS Harvey Milk, USNS Earl Warren, and USNS Robert F. Kennedy. Under Secretary Carlos Del Toro of the Biden Administration the pattern expanded further to include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Dolores Huerta, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, and Thurgood Marshall.

None of these individuals are historically insignificant. That is not the issue.

The issue is that the Navy increasingly moved away from honoring naval heritage, martial accomplishment, states, battles, presidents, Sailors, Marines and historically associated naming systems, and instead embraced contemporary ideological symbolism. Under Mabus and Del Toro, ship naming often ceased to function as institutional continuity and instead became a vehicle for cultural and political messaging.

Critics viewed this as replacing rather than broadening naval tradition.

That perception was reinforced by the increasingly selective logic surrounding these decisions. USS Harvey Milk became especially controversial because Milk’s connection to naval service was brief—he served for four years during the Korean War. Rather, his symbolic importance rested overwhelmingly within modern political and cultural debates. To critics, the naming appeared less an act of naval commemoration than a deliberate political statement executed through naval institutions.

Under Del Toro, the pattern established by Mabus accelerated, and his decision to rename USS Chancellorsville (CG-62) represented an even sharper break with historical precedent.

The cruiser had served for more than three decades under the name Chancellorsville, commemorating the Civil War battle. Del Toro concluded that the name’s association with Confederate victory rendered it inappropriate, and the ship was renamed USS Robert Smalls after an enslaved man who escaped during the Civil War and later became a U.S. Navy ship pilot and politician.

Critics viewed the move less as institutional correction than as political gesture. Generations of sailors had deployed, fought, and served aboard Chancellorsville. Renaming the vessel did little to alter that lived history. More importantly, the logic itself appeared highly selective.

Del Toro raised no comparable objections to USS Pearl Harbor or USS Bataan, both named after devastating American defeats. Evidently, some historical discomforts remained acceptable while others did not.

Like it or not, Chancellorsville was named after a battle in which American soldiers fought, suffered, and died. Union troops died there too. Were they somehow unworthy of remembrance because the Confederacy happened to prevail on that field?

The renaming of USNS Maury to USNS Marie Tharp reflected the same institutional impulse. Matthew Fontaine Maury, despite his late-in-life association with the Confederacy, remained one of, if not the, foundational figures in oceanography and naval science. Marie Tharp was unquestionably a pioneering oceanographic cartographer, though not remotely in Maury’s class. Perhaps more important, while she wasn’t ever in the Navy, neither was she in the Confederacy. The replacement appeared driven more by contemporary politics than naval continuity.

Historically, the Navy displayed extreme reluctance to rename commissioned ships at all. One of the few famous exceptions involved USS Biddle (DDG-5), commissioned in 1962, and renamed —a full two years after commission—USS Claude V. Ricketts by Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze following Admiral Ricketts’s death in 1964. The decision caused deep resentment within the crew and among the Biddle family itself, to the point that sailors continued referring to the vessel as the “original Biddle” across the life of the ship.

As for the deeply displeased Biddle family, Nitze ultimately sought to make amends by assigning the name to a second—and larger—ship in honor of their relative. A few years later, USS Biddle (CG-34) was commissioned in January 1967.

That earlier controversy now appears almost quaint compared to modern renaming efforts.

Recently, USNS Harvey Milk joined this strange category. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed Secretary of the Navy John Phelan to remove Milk’s name and redesignate the vessel USNS Oscar V. Peterson after a Medal of Honor recipient. Predictably, critics condemned the move as politically motivated. Yet the fact that such reversals now occur at all illustrates the deeper institutional problem. Ships increasingly reflected immediate political symbolism rather than enduring historical consensus.

Historical distance exists for a reason.

Warships remain in service for decades. The reputations of public figures often do not.

The naming of USNS Cesar Chavez demonstrates the danger with unusual clarity. In 2012, Ray Mabus honored Chávez as a labor icon and civil-rights figure by naming a ship of the Lewis and Clark, or “Explorer-class,” of dry cargo vessels after Chavez. By 2026, however, allegations of sexual abuse, coercion, and rape—including accusations involving minors—were levied by Dolores Huerta, Chaves’s partner in establishing the United Farm Workers (UFW). Curiously, after Mabus named a ship for Chavez, Del Toro named a ship of the John Lewis-class replenishment oilers after Huerta. In any event, the whole debacle triggered congressional demands that the ship be renamed

The embarrassment was entirely avoidable

Time acts as a filter. It separates enduring historical stature from temporary political enthusiasm and allows reputations to settle before institutions immortalize individuals in steel. Increasingly, however, modern naming decisions have abandoned precisely that restraint.

The same problem applies to Del Toro’s decisions to name Arleigh Burke-class destroyers after Secretary Mabus.

First, the temporal distance between the end of Mabus’s tenure and the announcement of a DDG bearing his name was a mere eight years. That proximity alone raises the question of whether sufficient historical distance exists to separate enduring institutional contribution from contemporary policy dispute. Second, and more importantly, Mabus remains in many assessments one of the most partisan and failed secretaries in the history of the Navy.

Laid against the background of the Chinese Navy’s explosive growth in shipbuilding, Mabus’s tenure is primarily associated with priorities such as the so-called “Green Fleet” initiative and an aggressive emphasis on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Critics argue that these initiatives, whatever their broader political or cultural intent, were not clearly aligned with the Navy’s central warfighting mandate: preparing to fight and win the Nation’s wars at sea. In that view, the emphasis risked diffusing institutional focus at a moment when peer-competitor naval expansion was accelerating. And then there were his extraordinary name choices for ships, which lifted that duty from traditional to almost belligerently political.

From this perspective, naming a major combatant such as a destroyer after Mabus does not simply commemorate service in public office; it appears to elevate a contested policy agenda into permanent institutional honor. Unlike names anchored in battlefield valor, enduring strategic victories, or long-settled historical reputations, the legacy of a recent secretary whose tenure is still actively debated lacks the stabilizing distance that has traditionally guided naval naming practice.

Taken together, the combination of short temporal separation, ongoing controversy over strategic priorities, and the unprecedented scope of institutional change associated with his tenure forms the basis of the objection. The concern is not merely whether Ray Mabus is worthy of recognition, but whether the Navy should enshrine in steel the legacy of a still-disputed era before history has had time to render its judgment.

That is precisely what tradition once guarded against.

Ship naming in the United States Navy has never been merely administrative. It is institutional memory made visible. Names tell sailors—and the nation itself—what is worthy of honor, sacrifice, remembrance, and permanence.

For much of American naval history, the system possessed coherence. Battleships carried states. Cruisers carried cities. Destroyers carried heroes. Submarines carried the creatures of the sea. Exceptions existed, but they were restrained enough that the larger logic remained intact.

Increasingly, however, that restraint has weakened. The issue is now whether tradition still exercises meaningful authority over warship naming.

Under recent administrations, particularly those of Ray Mabus and Carlos Del Toro, naming decisions increasingly reflected contemporary political signaling rather than settled institutional judgment. At the same time, some of the Navy’s greatest combat heroes and most distinguished warships remain conspicuously absent from the fleet register, while USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and USS Gabrielle Giffords represent the Navy. And the mania for ensuring that every Secretary of the Navy has a worthy ship named after him has finally arrived at the door of the Virginia-class submarines with the advent of USS John Dalton (SSN-808).

That imbalance matters.

A warship is not a press release. It is not a campaign banner or ideological slogan. It is a vessel intended to outlive administrations, controversies, and political fashions. Its name should therefore be chosen with the same long horizon.

Otherwise, the Navy risks transforming its ships from instruments of national memory into floating monuments to the passions of the present moment.

Captain Eyer is a retired Surface Warfare Officer who served on active duty for 27 years.  He deployed in seven cruisers and commanded three Aegis cruisers; USS Thomas S. Gates (CG 51), USS Shiloh (CG 67), and USS Chancellorsville (CG 62). Captain Eyer completed tours on both the Navy Staff and Joint Staff and attained a master’s from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tuft’s University.  He was the US Naval Institute Proceedings Author of the Year in 2017, and three-time winner of the Surface Navy Literary Award.