The Trump administration is now referring to the Pentagon as the Department of War, even though the name has not legally changed.
On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump signed an executive order giving the Department of Defense the “secondary name” of the Department of War – a workaround for the fact that a formal name change requires an act of Congress. The order also authorizes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the “secondary title” of secretary of war.
The change aligns with the administration’s fixation on “lethality” and a “warrior ethos,” and exemplifies the more aggressive military posture it has been taking, such as its legally questionable military strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean and deployment of troops to U.S. cities.
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“We’re going Department of War,” Trump said during an Oval Office signing ceremony. “I think it’s a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.”
“It really has to do with winning,” Trump added later. “We should have won every war. We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct or ‘wokey.’”
Standing alongside Trump, Hegseth said the name change signifies the department will focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.”
Almost immediately after the signing, the rebrand began. The defense.gov website redirected to war.gov; Hegseth’s handle on the social media site X changed to @SecWar; and officials swapped the placard on Hegseth’s office door with one with the secretary of war title.
Trump and his allies have framed the rebrand as a return to the Defense Department’s historical name, but the Department of War was not the same agency as the Pentagon.
The Department of War was, essentially, the Department of the Army.
The Department of War was established as a Cabinet agency shortly after the ratification of the Constitution in 1789. Nine years later, the Department of the Navy was established as its own Cabinet agency.
Following World War II, then-President Harry Truman advocated for a sweeping reorganization of the country’s national security agencies, arguing the war demonstrated that the existing structure was incohesive and uncollaborative.
Congress approved the reorganization with the 1947 National Security Act. The law replaced the Department of War with the Department of the Army; created the Air Force; and established a new umbrella organization to oversee the departments of the Army, Air Force and Navy.
Originally called the National Military Establishment, the name of the umbrella agency was changed to the Department of Defense with a 1949 amendment to the National Security Act.
The choice of the word “defense” for the nascent department reflected changing attitudes about the morality of war, said Matthew Schmidt, associate professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven.
“After Truman – of course, he was the only human being to order the dropping of nuclear weapons – everybody rapidly realized that you could not have a department of war, because the whole point of such a place was to defend against the outbreak of war because it was understood that no one could win in a nuclear war,” Schmidt said.
Conversely, reviving the Department of War name signals a return to a more aggressive mindset, he added.
“It signals a move back into an older, more insecure and frightening global order where the world and the peoples of the world, including the peoples of the United States, have to worry about warfare as an everyday function and not as something that should be rare, that should be defended against,” Schmidt said. “There’s no reason that you can’t have a Department of Defense that is focused on this idea of lethality and not call it a Department of Defense. You do not have to privilege this idea of aggressive war in order to privilege the idea of lethality. You can say the best way to defend my country, the best way to defend the Constitution, is to bulk up the lethality of my military.”
While Trump’s order does not formally rename the department, it directs Hegseth to come up with legislative proposals to do so.
Hegseth may not have much work to do on that front. Republicans have already introduced proposals in Congress to officially change the name to the Department of War.
As first reported by Military.com last week, Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., filed an amendment to the annual defense policy bill to make the change. Steube and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also introduced a stand-alone bill this week to formalize the name change.
“‘But senator, don’t you often criticize needless foreign wars?’ Yes. I also oppose polite euphemisms that help politicians dodge responsibility for the deadly conflicts they often engineer and force you to pay for,” Lee posted on social media Tuesday about introducing the bill.
Still, it’s unclear whether such legislation could pass. Legislation in the Senate usually needs 60 votes to pass, and Democrats, who hold 47 seats in the upper chamber, are panning the idea.
“Only someone who avoided the draft would want to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a former naval aviator, posted on social media Thursday night.
Related: Trump Wants a Department of War. A House GOP Amendment Would Give Him One.
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