Naming of Submarines

Recently, the Department of the Navy released the selection of the name for the fifth Virginia class submarine. The new boat will be christened USS New Hampshire (SSN 778). This is in line with the previously stated policy of naming the Virginia-class boats after states. (The first four are Virginia, Texas, Hawaii, and North Carolina.) Although states are always politically popular names, I expect that eventually we'll see political expediency cause the Navy to throw in an exception. Ever since they stopped the tradition of naming submarines for fish, submarine names have been all over the map. Today, we have 18 Ohio-class submarines, all named for states with the exception of the USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN 730). The Los Angeles-class attack submarines are mostly named for cities, with once again one notable exception (USS Hyman G. Rickover, SSN 709). The worst example of screwing around with ship names and tradition is, of course, the Seawolf class. Don't get me wrong, these are great boats -- I served on two of them. However, not only did they name them after a fish, a state (USS Connecticut), and a President (PCU Jimmy Carter), they also threw out a century of tradition and started the hull numbers over at SSN-21. This was the original program name, and stood for "submarine for the 21st century". Thankfully, they went back to the original sequence of numbers for the Virginia class; I only wish they could have left 3 numbers vacant after USS Cheyenne (SSN 773) for some future tradition-minded Secretary of the Navy to rectify the mistake...

Going deep....