Switcheroos have marked the naming of Navy submarines for decades

Sailors stand on the sub during the ceremony.

The USS Hyman G. Rickover is commissioned at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Conn., on Oct. 14, 2023. (John Narewski/U.S. Navy)

This month, a welder at a Virginia shipyard etched the keel plate of the USS Barb, the ceremonial birthing of a new submarine.

The Virginia-class fast attack submarine joins hundreds of Navy subs through history named after sea creatures. So will the next three on the construction list: the USS Tang, USS Wahoo and USS Silversides.

The names are throwbacks to an earlier time. Only one Navy submarine has been commissioned with the name of a sea creature since the USS Cavalla, named for a saltwater fish, in 1973.

Since 1862, federal law directs that the Secretary of Navy will choose the names of new ships, in consultation with the president and Congress. There are longstanding protocols: For decades, battleships were named for states, cruisers for cities and submarines for sea creatures.

But a 2012 congressional report outlining the protocols said one rule was above all others:

“A secretary’s discretion to make exceptions to ship-naming conventions is one of the Navy’s oldest ship-naming traditions,” the report said.

Nowhere has the naming protocol gone through as many variations as with submarines.

A Revolutionary War-era submersible was called “Turtle.” The Union experimented with a submersible named “Intelligent Whale” during the Civil War. Sea creature names were applied to submarines through two world wars and the first two decades of the Cold War. Sailors might serve on a fearsome sea creature, such as Barracuda, Stingray or Shark. Others pulled duty on what sounded like entrees on a wharf diner menu: Trout, Bass, Tuna and Cod.

In 1959, the Navy rolled out a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. Instead of a fish, the first of its class was named the USS George Washington. The other four “boomer” nuclear missile boats bore the names of people from American military and wartime history: Patrick Henry, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and, in a sign of a different time, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Attack subs retained fish names for another decade.

In 1969, the Navy was preparing to christen the USS Redfish when Rep. William H. Bates, a Massachusetts Republican and staunch Navy supporter, died. Navy Secretary John Chafee broke with tradition and named the attack submarine for the congressman.

What happened next drew unfavorable comment from the New York Times in 1985.

“Within the next few years, down the ways slid the Glenard P. Lipscomb, ranking minority member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, the L. Mendel Rivers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and the Richard B. Russell, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and ranking majority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

It was the beginning of a shift that saw submarines increasingly named for cities, then states, with occasional persons thrown into the mix. The Navy built 62 Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarines from 1976 to 1996, with all but one named after cities.

Adm. Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” accepted the politically expedient naming change. “Fish don’t vote,” he said.

Ironically, when Rickover retired in 1984, the future USS Providence was renamed the USS Hyman G. Rickover. It was the only Los Angeles-class submarine to break the naming protocol of American cities.

The Seawolf surfaces, white water in its wake, with the carrier and destroyer sailing nearby and the helicopter flying above.

The USS Seawolf fast-attack submarine makes its way through the Pacific Ocean in June 2021, along with carrier USS Carl Vinson and destroyer USS Dewey. Hovering above it is an MH-60R helicopter from the Carl Vinson. (Haydn N. Smith/U.S. Navy)

For fish-favoring traditionalists, there was hope for the future. As Cold War tensions ratcheted up in the 1980s, the Navy announced it would build more than 25 new fast-attack submarines called the Seawolf class.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and congressional efforts to cut the post-Cold War defense budget led to the Seawolf program ending with just two more submarines, with only the first, the USS Seawolf, getting a sea creature name. The second was named the USS Connecticut. The third and final, the USS Jimmy Carter, was for the 39th President, who served under Rickover as a young submarine service officer.

By the time the renewed Russian military threat had the U.S. Navy ratcheting up construction of the new Virginia-class attack submarines in the late 1990s, the fish monikers were shelved.

Of the first 30 boats of its class christened, 28 are named for states. Boats named for former Navy Secretary and U.S. Sen. John Warner, and a new submarine named for Rickover, were the exceptions.

At the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, the Navy decided it was time bring back the sea creature names. Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite chose the names of four World War II submarines that had some of the highest scores for sinking enemy ships: Barb, Tang, Wahoo and Silversides.

The switch was short-lived. When President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, new Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro made a U-turn. He named a Virginia-class submarine the USS John H. Dalton, in honor of the Navy secretary under President Bill Clinton. Eight more were given place names associated with the Navy, including Potomac, Norfolk and Brooklyn.

Trump’s return to the White House has not yet manifested any new trend in submarine names. But with up to two Virginia-class boats to be built each year, Navy Secretary John Phelan will have a chance to make his own mark on the ever-shifting tradition of submarine names.