White House to Rebrand Pentagon the Department of War
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Government Rebranding
The White House plans to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War, sparking debate among commenters about the motivations and implications of the move.
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Sep 5, 2025 at 7:31 AM EDT
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Still... I recall a lot of his supporters telling me that they liked how he wanted to get out of foreign entanglements, and therefore wouldn't engage in needless warfare. Indeed, we didn't start any new wars from 2017-2021, and he set a date for withdrawing from Afghanistan (though it fell to his successor to implement it and take the hit for the fact that we never did manage to install a stable government).
Still, it's refreshingly honest. It was the Department of War for most of history, and was only optimistically renamed "Defense" so that people could tell themselves that WW II really was the war to end all wars. That didn't last long and we started waging war almost immediately.
I appreciate the Posse Comitatus Act, "the best defense is a good offense", and the rename in 1947, but when we created a whole new department called "Homeland Security" because Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense didn't want to own the mission of "defense", the old name just struck me as too disingenuous/Orwellian.
I am a bit nervous about branding the DoD back to the Department of War though. ... Perhaps we should rename it to what General/President Eisenhower warned us it was, "Department of the Military Industrial Complex"?
Half-kidding.
Presumably he’ll also add the name to lots of signs and forms, wasting a bunch of money.