Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that a Navy^[1] supply ship that honored a veteran who was the first openly gay politician in California will be renamed for a sailor who was awarded the Medal of Honor^[2] during World War II in a video message posted online Friday^[3].

In the video, Hegseth said that he would be renaming the John Lewis-class oiler USNS Harvey Milk in honor of Chief Watertender Oscar V. Peterson. Peterson heroically sacrificed his life^[4] while his ship, the USS Neosho, was under attack by the Japanese during the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Military.com first reported^[5] that Hegseth had ordered the Navy secretary, who has the legal power to name ships, to rename the Milk earlier in June, and an official said that the choice to strip the ship of the gay rights icon's name during Pride Month was deliberate on Hegseth's part.

Read Next: New Army Shaving Policy Will Allow Soldiers with Skin Condition that Affects Mostly Black Men to Be Kicked Out^[6]

According to a Navy memo reviewed by Military.com, the renaming was being done so that there is "alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture," apparently referencing President Donald Trump, Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan.

Both Hegseth, and the Pentagon's top spokesman, Sean Parnell, claimed that the renaming -- a move that is incredibly rare for the U.S. Navy -- was to remove politics from the ship naming process.

Hegseth claimed in his video that "this is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration." However, the Milk was actually named in 2016 by then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and the entire class of ships are named after civil rights and human rights activists including Harriet Tubman, who helped slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who championed civil rights.

Parnell, in an emailed statement, claimed that the choice of Harvey Milk was "widely viewed as an ideologically motivated action that countless sailors and veterans found abhorrent."

The Pentagon did not answer Military.com's request for any evidence of the claim.

Despite the comments from the defense secretary's office, politics have been part of ship naming throughout the modern era.

A Congressional Research Service report^[7] on ship naming found numerous instances in which members of Congress have advocated for or against ship names -- often with the aim of having their state or someone from their state be honored.

The report also notes that 1819 and 1858 laws "set forth naming rules for certain kinds of ships," and there is still a law on the books that requires battleships -- a class of ship not built since World War II -- be named after states.

In his video, Hegseth said that "people want to be proud of the ship they're sailing in," but other ship names have also skirted controversy and raised concerns without being renamed.

The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis honors a U.S. senator from Mississippi who had a long track record of supporting racial segregation.

In the 1950s, Stennis signed the so-called "Southern Manifesto," which called for massive resistance to the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools. He also voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It wouldn't be until 1982 that Stennis seemed to finally abandon those views with his support for the extension of the Voting Rights Act that year.

Similarly, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is named after Rep. Carl Vinson from Georgia who, like Stennis, was a segregationist who signed the Southern Manifesto and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

More recently, in 2010, for example, some service members were outraged that the Navy would choose to name an amphibious ship after the late Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., after his long record of service as a key leader of the House appropriations defense subcommittee.

Murtha had said that a 2005 incident in which a squad of Marines had killed around two dozen non-combatants was an overreaction on their part and they "killed innocent civilians in cold blood^[8]."

Charges were eventually filed against some of the Marines over the incident; ultimately, most of the charges were dropped, one Marine was acquitted, and one pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty.

A defense official told Military.com that there were currently no plans to rename any other ships in the same class of ships as the Harvey Milk, and that the name change will formally happen sometime in the next six months.

The ship is currently completing maintenance and refit work at a shipyard in Alabama that is expected to wrap up by the end of June^[9].

Related: Hegseth Orders Navy to Strip Name of Gay Rights Icon Harvey Milk from Ship^[10]

President Donald Trump said he wants to bring back a long-retired title: secretary of war. Why was it dropped in the first place?

Trump brought up the idea of a name change while introducing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a June 25 press conference in the Netherlands, which hosted this year’s NATO summit.

“You know, it used to be called secretary of war,” the president said. “Maybe for a couple of weeks we’ll call it that because we feel like warriors.”

“In fact, if you look at the old building next to the White House, you can see where it used to be secretary of war,” Trump added. “Then we became politically correct and they called it secretary of defense. Maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”

Here’s why the secretary of war came to be known as the secretary of defense. Secretary of war

The title of secretary of war dates back to the founding of the United States.

In 1789, shortly after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, President George Washington signed legislation establishing the War Department, according to the Department of Defense.

The new department was tasked with overseeing and maintaining the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, all of which were set up three years earlier.

Washington chose Henry Knox, one of his aides during the Revolutionary War — and the namesake of Fort Knox — to serve as its first secretary.

Then, less than a decade later, in 1798, the scope of the department shrank, when management of the Navy was handed over to the newly formed Navy Department. And, in 1834, the Marine Corps was moved under the Navy Department, leaving just the Army under the War Department.

In 1879, following the Civil War, the War Department took up headquarters in the newly built Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It was then referred to as the State-War-Navy Building — as Trump referenced in his recent press conference. --

In 1947, during the aftermath of World War II, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which combined the War and Navy Departments, as well as the newly formed Air Force, into one organization known as the National Military Establishment.

This new organization was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949, according to Dartmouth University records.

James Forrestal, who had previously served as the secretary of the Navy, then became the nation’s first secretary of defense.

This title has remained in use ever since then, with Hegseth being the country’s 29th secretary of defense.

© 2025 The Herald (Rock Hill, S.C.). Visit www.heraldonline.com^[1]. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.^[2]

The Pentagon said Thursday that more than $5 billion is being budgeted in the upcoming year for the Trump administration's military operation at the U.S. southern border -- and that some unrelated military projects may need to be pushed aside.

But defense officials, who briefed the press on annual budget plans, said they are betting on a Trump agenda bill in Congress to backfill any money pulled from current military funds to pay for border operations. The services have paid for the deployment^[1] of thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to Los Angeles amid immigration raid protests by shifting funds meant for barracks and other operations.

The budget plans for fiscal 2026 were released -- though with less detail than was typical of past Defense Department budgets -- as President Donald Trump is pursuing mass deportations across the country and expanding the role of the military in immigration and border security, including surging troops to the Mexico border and creating new military zones there.

Read Next: Upcharging on Food, Selling Booze: The Army's Plan to Privatize Dining^[2]

Defense officials spoke to the press about the budget plans only on condition of anonymity. In the past, the Pentagon has rolled out its annual budgets with military and civilian officials speaking on the record.

"We did work with the services to discuss what projects might be deferred just for one year to enable us to reprogram that money and use it for the border and for other purposes as well," a senior defense official said.

The Pentagon is assuming the military funding holes left by shifting money to immigration and border missions now will be filled by the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" -- legislation still being debated in Congress that is designed to enact Trump's agenda.

The proposed funding in that bill is intended "to backfill those projects that were pushed out a little bit to make room for those emerging national security needs," the official said.

The Pentagon has already moved to gut $1 billion from the Army^[3]'s budget to maintain its facilities, including living quarters for junior troops that for years have suffered from dilapidated conditions.

The raiding of Army facilities money sparked bipartisan ire on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers asking Army officials during a June budget hearing about the effects on soldiers' quality of life.

Gen. Randy George, the service's top officer, noted that in triaging budget priorities, something had to give. "Obviously, redirecting has an impact -- you have to make choices," he said.

In his previous term, Trump diverted $1 billion from an account that covers bonuses and other pay^[4] for troops to fund 57 miles of border wall.

Meanwhile, roughly 10,000 U.S. troops, including Marines, have now surged to the southern border. That includes elements of the 4th Infantry Division equipped with Stryker^[5] armored vehicles -- a deployment level that rivals, and in some cases exceeds, the number of American forces currently stationed in global combat zones.

While the U.S. military has maintained a border presence in various forms for decades, the latest ramp-up under Trump comes as the force is largely overstretched. During the previous administration, senior Pentagon leaders privately voiced concerns about the growing strain on units already juggling deployments across Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East.

In response to anti-immigration raid protests in California, the Trump administration has also deployed thousands of troops to LA. That new mission is being taken out of other existing accounts, too.

The estimated cost of the LA mission, which includes 4,000 federalized National Guard^[6] troops and 700 Marines, is $134 million, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, the Pentagon's acting chief financial officer and comptroller, said at a congressional hearing earlier this month.

"The money will be pulled from the troops' existing operations and maintenance accounts," she said.

Defense officials said Thursday that the fiscal 2026 budget would offer junior troops at least $5 billion for barracks maintenance and construction, though they weren't immediately able to offer details of what that money would be spent on.

A senior Navy^[7] official told reporters that the sea service planned on spending $4.2 billion on barracks maintenance and construction.

The Marine Corps^[8] is slated to receive $2.9 billion of that total as part of the service's ambitious Barracks 2030 program, which has set out to improve unaccompanied housing for tens of thousands of Marines, to include civilian specialists to help manage the day-to-day workload.

Military.com reported in April that if that Capitol Hill did not appropriate enough funding for the Marine Corps' roughly $11 billion total improvement effort, Barracks 2030 could get pushed into the 2040s, long after many junior Marines could reap its benefits.

Eric Mason, the unaccompanied housing team lead for the service's installations arm, said then that "if, for some reason, God forbid, we don't get all the money we're asking for, then we have a backup plan, an alternate plan, which takes [us] out to about 2045, 2043, depending on how much we end up getting."

A senior Army official said that service plans to spend $2.5 billion on barracks, including $411 million for barracks at Fort Wainwright^[9] in Alaska, Eglin Air Force Base^[10] in Florida, and Fort Campbell^[11] in Kentucky.

An Air Force official said the service is asking for $2.5 billion with a focus on building child development centers at Eglin, Travis Air Force Base^[12] in California, and Tinker Air Force Base^[13] in Oklahoma, as well as dormitories.

Specific details, such as why those funding amounts from each service add up to more than the announced $5 billion for barracks maintenance and construction, were not provided to Military.com.

Overall, Thursday's budget rollout represented an unprecedented move in what few specific details were provided to justify the "asks" from all the services. The $5 billion for the border mission -- and a notable amount of the Pentagon's 2026 budget overall -- is also tied to the success of the proposed Trump agenda bill, which is for now uncertain.

The White House has repeatedly advertised those funds as part of the Department of Defense's budget request. While it's being marketed as a $1 trillion budget, at least $113 billion is proposed in the unpassed reconciliation bill, meaning the amount is closer to around $848 billion -- roughly the same amount spent in the current fiscal year.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., told Military.com that Thursday's budget rollout is "the most disjointed and poorly executed budget release" he'd ever seen.

He described the administration's justification for its priorities as "an absolute failure."

"It's not clear that there is any strategy behind the numbers or if they even know what the numbers really are," Harrison told Military.com. "They seem to be relying on this mythical reconciliation bill that they didn't request and is not yet finalized to fill in gaps that they created."

And some services are actually seeing cuts in the new budget.

For example, in the Space Force^[14], discretionary funding decreased from $29.4 billion to $26.3 billion. A White House official told Military.com that roughly $13.8 billion in related mandatory funding would actually make it an increase, but didn't specify the source of all the totals.

Related: Space Force Budget Faces Uncertainty as White House Bets on Supplemental Money from Congress^[15]