In article ,
(Penta) wrote:

Policy? What policy?
Besides the fact that most of the names suck. (When compared to, say,
the British naming traditions.)

We need standards. Badly.

You used to have quite reasonable ones, as far as I've deduced from
reading:

Battleships: States
Carriers: Battles
Cruisers: Cities
Destroyers: Err, well, anything - there are so many of them.
Submarines: Fish
Small craft: Integers.

And re-using the States and Cities for missile and attack subs was also
plausible, since they could fairly claim to have inherited similarly
important (though not really analogous) roles.

The really old names, like _Constitution_ and _President_ were quite
reasonable too, although there probably aren't that many "republican"
names that wouldn't sound silly. A few of those got used on semi-recent
carriers like _Independence_ and _America_, and you always ought to have a
carrier named _Kitty Hawk_.

But the naming of things after political figures has definitely gone too
far.

---
John Dallman