This week, the Department of Defense made an unprecedented move: They renamed a ship, originally christened the USNS Harvey Milk. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's memo, the goal was to ensure "alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture."
And predictably, the radical left went insane. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose district encompasses San Francisco -- the home of Harvey Milk -- called it "a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country ... a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream." Part of this supposed legacy was the creation, in 2018, of the John Lewis-class replenishment oilers, designated to be named after various civil rights leaders, including Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But this idea is rather stupid in the first place.
First off, these figures are not exactly anonymous. There are currently two public schools named after Milk (one in San Francisco and one in New York), despite the fact that he was a scurrilous figure who had sex with a 16-year-old runaway while he was in his 30s and rather prominently supported murderous cult leader Jim Jones. A film was made about his life starring Sean Penn, who won an Oscar for the hagiography.
Traditionally, U.S. Navy ships have been named after places (USS Ohio) or presidents (USS Ronald Reagan) or military heroes (USS John Paul Jones) or ideas (USS Enterprise or USS Hope) or even Native American tribes (USS Seminole). The reason for these naming conventions is obvious: They are not polarizing. If you name a ship after John F. Kennedy or Doris Miller, you're not offending anyone; we can all acknowledge JFK's presidency and Doris Miller's World War II heroism.
But that's not what happened with the USS Harvey Milk. When the name was announced, radical state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-Calif., explained, "When Harvey Milk served in the military, he couldn't tell anyone who he truly was. Now our country is telling the men and women who serve, and the entire world, that we honor and support people for who they are." That, of course, is a strange proposition for the United States military, which is fundamentally (SET ITAL)not(END ITAL) about honoring people for "who they are" but for what they do -- and given that the topic is ship-naming, what they do ought to be at least tangentially related to the question of military readiness.
The Trump administration's renaming is part and parcel of a broader shift away from the censorious wokeness that crippled military recruitment and led to an astonishing diminishment in the perception of our military strength. It turns out that young men don't really want to join a military that is more focused on cultural signaling than lethal efficiency -- and our enemies are far more sanguine about a military that focuses on which interest groups to placate than a military that focuses on victorious deadliness. Hegseth, in short, is right: If the purpose of branding is to establish a vision of the thing being branded, we are far better off with a USNS Daniel Daly -- a ship named after one of the most decorated Marines in American history -- than with a USNS Harvey Milk.
What's more, the Trump administration's refreshing willingness to say the obvious is a credit to the White House and the secretary of Defense. No, our military ought not be a canvas for the latest social revolutionary fad. We don't need a USNS RuPaul. We need an America united by our reverence for our citizen warriors -- and that means honoring the universal icons who remind us of their bravery and sacrifice.