A member of the MARHST-L discussion list pointed out a fairly recent Congressional Research Service document about the naming of US Naval vessels, titled “Navy Ship Names: Background for Congress“. It’s an interesting read. As a CRS document, it just provides background, and doesn’t discuss whether previous actions are right or wrong, but it sure does highlight how mixed-up the US Navy’s current approach to ship naming is.

I assume (but don’t know for sure) that this report is part of the response to a Senate Amendment to the FY2012 National Defense Authorization Act, adopted November 30, 2011, which called on the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to Congress within 180 days that contained an overview of the past naming of navaly ships, and recommendations for the future. This document is dated January 6, 2012, so I imagine it makes up the first part of the report to Congress. I would be interested to see how long it takes the Navy to develop the ‘policies’ part of the response.

I certainly hope the Navy, and its Naval History and Heritage Command, comes up with some much more specific policies on how ships should be named, and then sticks to them. It makes sense that aircraft carriers should be named after presidents (but should they only be named after good presidents?), and that, say, attack submarines should be named after states, and destroyers named after naval leaders and heroes. And so on, and so on. What seems most important to me is that they develop a sensible policy, and stick to it. It would be nice to be able to identify the type of vessel based on its type of name. (I realize that wouldn’t always be the case, but it’d be nice if it were nearly always the case.)

There should also be an inviolate policy that no individual be considered to have a ship named after them until 12 months have passed since their death.

But we’ll have to wait and see. If you hear of the release of the final document before I do, please let me know here.