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US president Donald Trump, who has been pushing hard for a Nobel Peace Prize and once talked about his administration causing “no new wars”, has pushed ahead with plans to rebrand the Department of Defense to the Department of War, signing an executive order on the name change on Friday.
Trump first floated the idea of a name change last week, when he told reporters in the Oval Office on 25 August that “we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too, if we have to be”.
You certainly can be offensive, Donald…
The executive order states Trump “believes this Department should have a name that reflects its unmatched power and readiness to protect national interests”.
It goes on to add: “The name ‘Department of War’ conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve compared to ‘Department of Defense’, which emphasizes only defensive capabilities.
“Restoring the name ‘Department of War’ will sharpen the focus of this Department on our national interest and signal to adversaries America’s readiness to wage war to secure its interests.”
The change also means Pete Hegseth will be known as the ‘Secretary of War’, as opposed to ‘Defense Secretary’.
But the name change – the latest from an administration which has also called the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’, and removed a ship’s link to an influential gay rights activist – has since raised eyebrows online:
“You don’t change the name to the Department of War unless you’re planning on going to war,” wrote one:
Another noted Trump previously described himself as the “anti-war president”:
And Ron Filipkowski, of MeidasTouch, tweeted: “I thought they ran on No New Wars?”:
It isn’t the first time that there's been a ‘Department of War’ within government, though, as one was formed back in 1789, before President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947 to bring the department under one organisation called the National Military Establishment (NME).
Two years later, that act was amended to rename the NME to the Department of Defense – a move Trump recently described as the US government going “woke”.
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