White House to Rebrand Pentagon the Department of War

politico.com

12 points·throw0101c··3 comments

Cool. I've thought we should do that for a while.

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.

Political allegiances aside, the naming of the Department of Defense started to rankle me in the bureaucratic posturing after 9/11.

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.

Formally telling us the nickname he prefers. The current name was set by Congress and they’d have to change it, so he’s not changing it, he’s putting his personal nickname for it in an EO.

Presumably he’ll also add the name to lots of signs and forms, wasting a bunch of money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com