US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on June 27 that the Navy was renaming a ship named for Harvey Milk, a navy veteran who became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the country before his assassination in 1978. In a video posted to social media on Friday morning, Hegseth said USNS Harvey Milk would now be named after Oscar V Peterson, a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Hegseth said it was important to "get the politics out of ship-naming" and stressed that "people want to be proud of the ship they're sailing in."