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On September 5th, President Trump signed his 200th executive order since retaking the Oval Office to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War.
Though official authority rests with Congress to rename the DoD, the order legally allows the Pentagon and all its staff to use the word “war” rather than “defense” as secondary titles.
The US maintained a War Department from the year 1789 until the year 1947, when President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act into law that renamed the War Department the Defense Department. Within a single secretarial term, the US Army and Air Force, nested inside the new Defense Department, entered and occupied southern Korea to fight a brutal, 3-year war, before launching an aggressive invasion of Vietnam some years later, the two wars resulting in millions of dead on both sides.
Indeed, since the renaming of the DoW to the DoD, not a single conflict in which US troops, airmen, or sailors have been engaged in open hostilities has been in the act of the defending the United States. Proponents of this militarism would say it was in defense of America’s interests abroad.
“I think it’s a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now,” the President said during the announcement press event. “We have the strongest military in the world”.
The current War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth agreed.
“We changed the name after World War II from the Department of War to the Department of Defense and … we haven’t won a major war since,” Hegseth said, before defining the new focus as being on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct”.
Under no illusions
In a fact sheet explaining the executive order, the White House admitted that only Congress can change the name of the Pentagon’s true office, but that hasn’t stopped it from changing its URL to war.gov from defense.gov.
“Restoring the name ‘Department of War’ will sharpen the focus of this department on our national interests and signal to adversaries America’s readiness to wage war to secure its interests,” the order explained.
There’s no reason to believe that any government harbors any illusions about America’s military being a defensive force, whether that’s the bombed-out regime in Tehran, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, who have been bombed 61 times this year alone, or war planners in Beijing preparing who knows how many contingencies in case of American intervention over an attempt to seize Taiwan by force.
Nations to whom America is an unfriendly force harbor no illusions about “America’s readiness to wage war to secure its interests”. These, such as North Korea, take measures to defend themselves by developing nuclear weapons. For those to whom America is an overly-friendly force, they defend themselves by signing themselves into servitude, such as the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands, rather than risk ending up as targets in a shooting match across the Pacific.
A true Department of Defense would look something like Japan’s military, which trains to defend the home islands from attacks, and how to respond to natural disasters.
The facts are that the US DoD/DoW maintains some 800 military posts around the world, ranging in size from small frontier operating bases like the al-Tanf garrison in Syria to massive urban centers like Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany. DoD oversees various “commands” such as AFRICOM—an entire Joint Forces command structure for operating on the continent of Africa. INDOPACOM, for operations in the Indo-Pacific, EUROCOM, for Europe, and CENTCOM, for Middle East and Central Asian operations, are also to be found.
Why would a defense ministry need four separate military command structures for each of the Old World continents? Because it doesn’t engage in defending America, but rather fighting wars in other countries. It’s well known that the US spends more on its military than many of the other largest and richest nations put together, a sum that’s needed to maintain total global operational capacity: the ability to triumph in military actions in a short space of time in any corner of the globe.
This was noted as much by the fact sheet released by the White House.
“The name ‘Department of War’ conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve compared to ‘Department of Defense,’ which emphasizes only defensive capabilities”. Readiness in military parlance means the ability attack, while resolve means the determination to do so.
Kenneth Royall was the last Secretary of War before it was changed to Secretary of Defense. From the end of his tenure to the current day, more than 25 operations, ranging in scale from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, to that of Lebanon, have been launched by Pentagon planners, without a single one involving an imminent threat against the homeland. WaL
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