Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that a Navy supply ship that honored a veteran who was the first openly gay politician in California will be renamed for a sailor who was awarded the Medal of Honor during World War II in a video message posted online Friday.
In the video, Hegseth said that he would be renaming the John Lewis-class oiler USNS Harvey Milk in honor of Chief Watertender Oscar V. Peterson. Peterson heroically sacrificed his life while his ship, the USS Neosho, was under attack by the Japanese during the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Military.com first reported that Hegseth had ordered the Navy secretary, who has the legal power to name ships, to rename the Milk earlier in June, and an official said that the choice to strip the ship of the gay rights icon’s name during Pride Month was deliberate on Hegseth’s part.
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According to a Navy memo reviewed by Military.com, the renaming was being done so that there is “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture,” apparently referencing President Donald Trump, Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan.
Both Hegseth, and the Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, claimed that the renaming — a move that is incredibly rare for the U.S. Navy — was to remove politics from the ship naming process.
Hegseth claimed in his video that “this is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration.” However, the Milk was actually named in 2016 by then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and the entire class of ships are named after civil rights and human rights activists including Harriet Tubman, who helped slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who championed civil rights.
Parnell, in an emailed statement, claimed that the choice of Harvey Milk was “widely viewed as an ideologically motivated action that countless sailors and veterans found abhorrent.”
The Pentagon did not answer Military.com’s request for any evidence of the claim.
Despite the comments from the defense secretary’s office, politics have been part of ship naming throughout the modern era.
A Congressional Research Service report on ship naming found numerous instances in which members of Congress have advocated for or against ship names — often with the aim of having their state or someone from their state be honored.
The report also notes that 1819 and 1858 laws “set forth naming rules for certain kinds of ships,” and there is still a law on the books that requires battleships — a class of ship not built since World War II — be named after states.
In his video, Hegseth said that “people want to be proud of the ship they’re sailing in,” but other ship names have also skirted controversy and raised concerns without being renamed.
The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis honors a U.S. senator from Mississippi who had a long track record of supporting racial segregation.
In the 1950s, Stennis signed the so-called “Southern Manifesto,” which called for massive resistance to the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools. He also voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It wouldn’t be until 1982 that Stennis seemed to finally abandon those views with his support for the extension of the Voting Rights Act that year.
Similarly, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is named after Rep. Carl Vinson from Georgia who, like Stennis, was a segregationist who signed the Southern Manifesto and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
More recently, in 2010, for example, some service members were outraged that the Navy would choose to name an amphibious ship after the late Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., after his long record of service as a key leader of the House appropriations defense subcommittee.
Murtha had said that a 2005 incident in which a squad of Marines had killed around two dozen non-combatants was an overreaction on their part and they “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”
Charges were eventually filed against some of the Marines over the incident; ultimately, most of the charges were dropped, one Marine was acquitted, and one pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty.
A defense official told Military.com that there were currently no plans to rename any other ships in the same class of ships as the Harvey Milk, and that the name change will formally happen sometime in the next six months.
The ship is currently completing maintenance and refit work at a shipyard in Alabama that is expected to wrap up by the end of June.
Related: Hegseth Orders Navy to Strip Name of Gay Rights Icon Harvey Milk from Ship
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