Names at Sea

In his infinite wisdom, Congressman Tom Tancredo* (R-CO) has launched a bill petitioning the US Navy to name their next $6 billion+, 100,000 ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS Barry Goldwater. This is annoying for several reasons. First, Goldwater had little to do with the Navy - he was a military pilot, yes, but he flew for the Army, and while he certainly helped pass various pieces of legislation relating to the military, that doesn't separate him from any number of other Senators and Congresspeople. Second, his impact on our politics was mostly down to the rejuvenation of the conservative movement, which - while important - doesn't exactly make him an automatic figure deserving of such a large honor. That's not a partisan complaint, exactly - I wouldn't support naming the ship the USS Teddy Kennedy, either. Instead, it's a complaint partly about the obvious politicization of what is after all a fairly considerable honor, and the process by which these things get decided.

Consider: the United States currently has a force of 11 active-duty nuclear supercarriers. They are enormous, incredibly expensive and currently unique to the United States. Most are named after former presidents, a slightly dull but more or less appropriate naming tradition (Jimmy Carter got a submarine named after him instead, which seems at first like a slap in the face but is probably the appropriate honor given that Carter was a submariner himself). One is named the Enterprise, which is a great name for a ship (although as a sci-fi fan I might be a little biased on that count), and one is named after Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded American forces in the Pacific in World War II. Fair enough. The remaining two, unfortunately, are named after ardent segregationists: the USS Carl Vinson and the USS John C. Stennis. Vinson and Stennis were both legislators who worked hard on behalf of the armed forces, which is something of a justification, but not enough in my view to overcome their support for institutionalized racism. Granted, a similar case could be made against a ship named after a fairly famous slaveowner, but that seems to me to be a fairly clear case of the good outweighing the bad, which isn't at all true for lesser politicians.

I doubt Tancredo's bill will get anywhere, but the Navy is in something of a pickle regarding the name for this ship. Every president between Eisenhower and HW Bush now has a ship named after him, with two exceptions: LBJ and Nixon. Needless to say, I very much doubt there will be a groundswell of support for naming a ship after either man. Clinton isn't particularly popular with the military; nor, I imagine, is W. Bush, and in any case I doubt they'd name a ship after presidents of such recent vintage. So the question of what to call the ship is an open question, and therefore, in our hyper-partisan political system, a potential battleground.

It's partly an issue because the ships are big, important symbols and partly an issue because the Navy does mostly stick to established naming conventions. Current submarines are named after cities and states, although in the past they were named, somewhat whimsically, for fish - a tradition I for one would like to see brought back. Cruisers, frigates and destroyers are generally named for heroes, ranging from Winston Churchill to deceased Medal of Honor recipients, the latter of which strikes me as an especially excellent idea. Amphibious warfare ships are named after battles and cities - again, safe choices. The two examples of the new class of Littoral Combat Ships are called Freedom and Independence, a convention which is a good idea in theory but suffers in practice due to the recent politicization of those terms.

Other nations generally follow similar rules, with a notable exception being the British, who have some ships named after royalty and some named after intangible, high-minded concepts. Also, they've named a bunch of ships HMS Invincible, which you have to respect just for the sheer chutzpah. You might as well name your ship the HMS I Dare You To Sink This Ship. My personal idea would be to paint the ships hot pink and name them things like the USS Daffodil and USS My Little Pony, just for the look of sheer horror and confusion on any potential enemy's face, but that's unlikely to be adopted. In seriousness, though, I'd like to dispense with some of the unnecessary political hagiography and bring back some of the more estoric names our ships used to have, like the Constellation.

This might seem all a bit silly, but here's why it's important: The Navy hasn't fought a real sea battle for decades.** Most of the Navy's combat units have never fired a shot in anger, and none, to my knowledge, has fought an enemy more fearsome than a pirate skiff or Iranian powerboat. The real operational purpose of the Navy these days is not sinking enemy fleets - there aren't any that can hope to stand up to it - but rather supporting military operations on land and engaging in what might be termed (somewhat inaccurately) soft power, ranging from conducting humanitarian and training missions to protecting sea lanes from pirates and simply showing the American flag. Those are important missions, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. But success in them isn't down to traditional naval metrics - tonnage or firepower or fleet size. The importance and prospects for success of those missions are in no small part down to perceptions.

Names, while they may seem like silly irrelevances, are actually important to the battle of perceptions, which even plays a part in conventional war: consider that both Stalin and Hitler placed enormous, disproportionate emphasis on Stalingrad thanks to their perceptions of its propaganda value. When we send the Navy off to perform its missions, no matter what form they take, the ships are a tangible representation of national policy. Letting politicians write their ideological affinities onto the ships' hulls only undermines that.

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* Tancredo is, for anyone who doesn't know, a spectacular piece of work. He at one point suggested that the appropriate American response to another mass-casualty terror attack would be to "take out" the holy sites at Mecca and Medina, and he had as a speechwriter a man who got drunk, screamed racial epithets at an African-American woman and then attacked her with a karate chop.

** In this, it's hardly alone - unless I'm missing something, I don't think there has been a naval battle any bigger than a skirmish anywhere in the world since 1945.