President Donald Trump on Monday foreshadowed that his administration, in coming days, will likely change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
Trump said officials would “probably” return the Pentagon to the more aggressive name it once held in about a week. Both he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has vowed to restore the department’s “warrior ethos” — have repeatedly lamented the name change, which occurred after World War II.
When “we won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War. And to me, that's really what it is,” Trump said at a press event with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. “Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
The War Department existed from 1789 until 1947, when the Truman administration split the department into the Army and the Air Force, and joined it with the then-independent Navy. Former President Harry Truman named the new cabinet-level agency the Defense Department.
Truman intended the name change to give the Pentagon chief more centralized powers over separate branches of the military, especially the Navy, which had significant independence through the end of World War II.
Trump has hinted in recent weeks about the possibility of reverting the name back, calling Hegseth his “Secretary of War” at a NATO summit in June and indicating that political correctness forced the switch. “If you look at the old building next to the White House, you can see where it used to be secretary of war,” he said. “Then we became politically correct and they called it secretary of Defense.”
The president suggested the rebranding was imminent. But the Pentagon would likely need any name change approved by Congress since the department was established by a decades-old law.
The Defense Department referred questions to the White House, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The switch is telling. Trump has championed his role in trying to settle conflicts around the world. But the effort to swap the Defense Department’s name indicates a president who is just as eager to talk about military strength overseas.
“I don't want to be defense only,” Trump said in the Oval Office earlier this morning. “We want offense too.”
Hegseth asked his followers on his personal X account in March about whether they’d prefer having a Department of Defense or Department of War. The majority sided with the latter.
Comments