Donald Trump is a showman who likes flashy spectacles and heated controversies. He has chosen Cabinet nominees for their shock value, attacked famous American universities, mobilized the Justice Department against his political enemies, and sent troops into American cities, fully aware of how much these theatrics would enrage his opponents.
But even in a term marked by political performance art, Trump’s plan to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War might be a new high—or low. An executive order making the change is expected tomorrow, Fox News reported.
Last month, when the plan was still just a hypothetical, the president was asked why he favored it. He said that Department of War “just sounded better” and that it would be a callback to the name under which U.S forces fought in the two world wars. But the change is also a reflection of how much Trump and Secretary of Defense (his title for now) Pete Hegseth think of themselves as tough guys, real fighters who will no longer trifle with silly names about “defending” things. Hegseth in particular is obsessed with “warfighters”—a clunky Pentagon term that’s been around for far too long—who will engage in “warfighting” with great “lethality.”
Both men seem to think that wimps cower and defend, but real men go on the offensive and whack the bad guys. After all, who are any of us to argue with General George Patton, who said in 1943: “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” And that, apparently, is what the U.S. military is going to do once it gives its watery collection of uniformed bureaucrats a name worthy of killers who want to grind the guts of America’s enemies between their clenched jaws.
It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. That name was good enough for Truman, who served in combat in World War I and dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. And it was good enough for President Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme allied commander, who oversaw the largest military operations ever undertaken in all of human history.
It was also good enough for John F. Kennedy, who served his country as a naval officer and nearly got killed during World War II. It was good enough for Lyndon B. Johnson, who won the Silver Star for his military service, and then, as commander in chief, embroiled the United States in a decade-long war in Southeast Asia. It was good enough for Naval Reserve officer Richard Nixon, who took over Johnson’s war and unleashed the fury of American bombers overseas. It was good enough for Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, both former Navy officers. It was good enough for Ronald Reagan, a former Army officer who as president pushed through a huge program of military expansion and modernization. It was good enough for his successor, George H. W. Bush, a decorated naval aviator who was shot down during combat in the Pacific.
Later presidents left the name alone too, perhaps because the rest of the world by the end of the 20th century had adopted the same name for their military organizations. Trump and Hegseth might think defense is a word for weenies, but the Chinese and the Russians, both of whom have ministries of defense, don’t seem to agree. (The Russians were even ahead of the Americans: The Kremlin created a “People’s Commissariat of Defense of the Soviet Union” in the 1930s, renamed part of it the “Ministry of War” briefly in the early 1950s, then settled on the “Ministry of Defense” in 1953.) North Korea has a Ministry of National Defense; Iran has a Ministry of National Defense and Armed Forces Logistics. If Trump thinks Moscow and Beijing will tremble when Hegseth orders the new stationery that says “War” on it, he’s in for a surprise.
And about that paperwork: The cost of renaming the DOD will run into tens of millions of dollars, maybe much more. Isn’t this an administration that only months ago unleashed an ignorant bazillionaire on the federal workforce in the name of efficiency and cost reductions? Everything from official seals to uniform patches and medals might have to be replaced—and for what? Because a president who never served a day in uniform and a macho-obsessed former Army major think that using words like war will provide the sense of purpose and gravity they both lack?
I have a better idea. Let’s skip the “War” name and go right to the “Department of Cringe.” It may not strike fear into the hearts of evildoers overseas, but it will resonate with Americans who take national defense seriously, because it is the emotion many of them already feel every time the former Major Hegseth says “lethality” and “warfighter.” If the leaders of the United States are going to make fools of themselves and of the dedicated men and women who serve in uniform simply to own the libs and put on a show for the party faithful, any name will do. They might as well choose one that’s accurate.
