Earlier this year, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, following the recommendations of the congressionally-mandated Naming Commission, announced his rationale for renaming the USNS Maury, a Navy ship that had been named after naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury, considered the “father of modern oceanography."

“We must put forth the effort to recognize figures who positively influenced our society,” Del Toro claimed.

While his renaming decision recognized such a person, oceanographer Marie Tharp, who created the first comprehensive seabed maps of the Atlantic Ocean, Del Toro’s statement implied that Maury somehow failed to make a positive contribution to society.

That is far from the truth. Maury (1806-1873) was born on a farm near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Later, the family moved to Tennessee. When he was 12 years old, Matthew survived a 45-foot fall from a tree. His back was so seriously injured that farming was out of the question. His father sent him to Harpeth Academy near Franklin, where he excelled, mastering languages and showing particular aptitude and interest in science.

In 1825, Maury began naval service on the new frigate Brandywine, the vessel selected to carry Lafayette back to France following his tour of America. From the start, as naval historian Miles P. DuVal wrote, “Maury impressed his superiors and fellow cadets as one resolved to master the theory and practice of the naval profession.” For most of the next nine years, he served at sea, including circumnavigating the Earth, using the opportunity to undertake his own investigations into oceanography and meteorology, and progressing steadily in his own evolution as a naval scientist.

A select list of Maury’s most important accomplishments includes the following:

This (incomplete) list demonstrates Maury’s astounding accomplishments.

As sectional tensions increased prior to 1861, Maury did not wish to see disunion. Late in 1860, fearing “the Union is gone,” Maury wrote appeals to the governors of four states encouraging them “to stand in the breach and stop this fratricidal strife.” Still, his native-son loyalty to the Virginia Commonwealth led him to resign his Navy commission and offer his services to his state, and later the Confederacy, when Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to invade the South, which were to pass through Virginia.

There is no question that Maury “positively influenced” not only the U.S. Navy but the scientific communities of America and other nations worldwide. One distinguished military historian, who knew a relative of Maury’s, writes, “He was one of America’s most brilliant and influential scientists at a critical point in the formative era of American science.”

The Navy’s discrediting of his name is “grotesque,” the historian added.

But it is also a symptom of the woke ideology running amok in our nation’s military. Preening ideologues in the military academies and Pentagon are quick to condemn those who dealt with the harsh realities of an earlier day as best they could.

Indeed, the Left’s efforts to slander those high-achievers of past generations and erase them from the history books are within the same vein as the divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies being pushed within the ranks. It should go without saying that this ideological experiment has no place in our nation’s military, which has been home to great men and women, flawed as they were, who have been overwhelming forces of good for their country.

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The U.S. Navy ought to heed the wisdom of prodigious scholar and author Thomas Sowell, who decades ago wrote that complex social problems are dealt with not by “solutions,” but, rather, “tradeoffs.” In the case of Maury, the status and reputation of American naval science, and its ability to inspire future scientists, have been lowered by the Stalinesque treatment of one of the 19th century’s greatest scientists, who was perhaps the Navy’s greatest scientist of that period.

But the Navy’s tradeoff advantage is merely that of virtue-signaling — which some will realize, too late, quenches the revolutionary thirst but for a moment.

Forrest L. Marion, Ph.D., is a retired military officer and government historian, and the author of four military histories including the forthcoming book, Standing Up Space Force: The Road to the Nation’s Sixth Armed Service (Naval Institute Press).