If nothing else, President Donald Trump has a gift for branding. That’s why it’s significant that he wants to restore the Department of Defense to its previous name: the Department of War.
Well, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Like the more recent Department of Homeland Security, the current Department of Defense brought together a new government entity with several preexisting ones. In the Pentagon’s case, the National Security Act of 1947 consolidated the Department of War, the Department of the Navy, and the newly minted Department of the Air Force after the Second World War. The military branches fully fell under the secretary of defense beginning in 1949.
But a return to what’s old is at least partly what Trump has in mind. “We won World War I [and] World War II. It was called the Department of War. To me, that’s really what it is,” he said last month. “I’m talking to the people. Everybody likes that. We had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
Yet it has been the Defense Department for almost all of the 79-year-old commander-in-chief’s life.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, dubbed the secretary of war by Trump during the most recent NATO summit, floated the name change on X, and most respondents to his social media poll approved. Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, have introduced legislation to make it a reality. If enacted, it would also make the old name turned new more permanent than if the Trump administration attempted to do this through some kind of executive action.
Trump wants to rid the military of any vestiges of wokeness or DEI. Gone is one l-word, “liberal,” and in its place is another: “lethality.” The Pentagon is supposed to be about warfighting rather than social experimentation at home and, one hopes, nation-building abroad.
To that end, the Department of War is starker and more to the point. Trump has acknowledged the War Department “just sounded to me better” and “had a stronger sound.” And even those who don’t like the direction of U.S. foreign policy over the past 25 years might like the transparency about what many hawks mean when they say defense: war. Maybe Congress would even start to declare wars again!
But herein also lies the problem for a president who has said since his first term that great nations do not fight endless wars. Toughness, precision, and a lack of political correctness aren’t the only reasons Trump is drawn to a different name for the department. “We want defense,” he has said, “but we want offense too.”
Sometimes, perhaps this is true. It is hard, however, to look at the interventionist turn of recent decades—including this summer under the second Trump administration—and conclude we aren’t very often on offense.
Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who has at times been a close Trump ally, has frequently contrasted a strong national defense with an “irrational offense.”
Relatively few American political leaders openly advocated nation-building or forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most said at the time that they wanted these engagements to be targeted and brief. Some of them actually meant it. Much early Iraq War planning was done with the conceit that regime change and its aftermath could be handled with a light military footprint.
Whatever may be true of his Republican predecessors, Trump does genuinely want limited engagements as opposed to forever wars. Having that desire and the political will to see it to fruition is important. But it is also something that is often easier said than done.
A foreign policy of offense often takes on a life of its own. You cannot easily cut and run from seemingly failed missions without clear-cut permission from the voters. American casualties need to be avenged. Like liberals with government programs, a war is something that supporters say can always be won with just a little more time and resources.
Then two decades later, the war in Afghanistan cannot be ended years after its achievable goals were realized without the immediate collapse of the U.S.-backed government and a humanitarian crisis. The war begins to become its own justification.
Different policy choices can always be made, of course, and those are not dictated by the name of a cabinet-level agency. Perhaps Trump is right that the Department of War would improve our focus.
All we are saying is give defense a chance.
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