Navy

The announcement comes the same day that President Obama signed the last piece of legislation sponsored by Giffords.

Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and the mother of the 9-year-old girl who was killed at last year’s Tucson, Ariz., shooting will attend a ship-naming ceremony Friday.

Former Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), who was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee from 2007 to 2011, will also be in attendance.

Four Virginia House members say that Pentagon budget cuts should stop the proposed move of a Naval aircraft carrier to Florida.

The group wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta urging him to reconsider the decision to move a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier from Norfolk, Va., to Mayport, Fla.

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The USS Dewey helped the crew of a sinking Iranian fishing dhow that had flooded in the central Arabian Sea.

The U.S. military rescued a second Iranian ship in the Persian Gulf in the past week, even as tensions continue to escalate between the two countries.

The U.S. Navy rescued six Iranians at 3 a.m. Tuesday who were aboard a small cargo ship that had flooded, according to a Navy press release.

After the ship asked for help with flares and flashlights, the U.S. Coast Guard ship Monomoy launched a small boat to rescue the six Iranians on board. Two were on board and four were in a life raft.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert made clear Tuesday his service is building new partnerships and enhancing existing ones in the Asia-Pacific region as China flexes its muscles.

Greenert called for increased U.S.-China military talks and cooperation to avoid a miscalculation that could lead to a conflict.

But he also repeatedly pointed to nations in China’s neighborhood with which the Navy is closely working, touting cooperation with Japan, Singapore, Australia, India, Indonesia and other Asia-Pacific nations during an appearance at a forum sponsored by the Center for a New American Security.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the United States acted under the rules of international order when it rescued an Iranian ship from pirates Thursday in the Arabian Sea.

"It's what we do. And it's what we do in that part of the world. We get a distress call, as we did in this case — even though it came from an Iranian ship — when the pirates went after them, we respond to those calls, and we did what we have to do in that situation," Panetta said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

The United States aircraft carrier, the USS Kidd responded to a distress call from the captain of an Iranian ship, which had been under control of pirates for about 40 days, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey.

The Iranian government for a second straight day has threatened to cut off oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. 

Senators are pointing to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that says the Navy and Marine Corps had $22 billion in disbursement and collection accounting errors as fresh evidence that the Pentagon budget still is nowhere close to audit-ready.

The GAO report, requested by seven House and Senate members, found the Navy and Marines accounting system failed an audit attempt of the “Fund Balance With Treasury,” which is the equivalent of a corporate bank account statement.

President Obama saluted the participants in the annual Army-Navy football game.