No, We Don’t Need a Department of War
And only Congress can change the name
There’s a simple reason we call the organization headquartered in the Pentagon the Department of Defense: our armed forces are designed to defend America and its interests. Our Constitution says that they can be used for “war” only if such offensive operations have been authorized by Congress.
The current president seems to believe that “defense” sounds weak. “I don’t want to be defense only,” he says. “We want defense, but we want offense, too. It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound. And as you know, we won World War I. We won World War II. We won everything.”
We have offense, or we’d better with a trillion dollar defense budget, but it’s supposed to be used in defense of interests, not foreign conquest. And the two world wars were fought by forces including both the War and Navy departments.
Changing the name of the department would suggest to the world that we want to go on offense against countries we don’t like. Is that how the Trump administration sees its role? Is that how we recruit friends and allies? Should we rename the Department of Commerce the Department of Extortion and Trade?
The armed forces are already enormously “lethal,” a term venerated by our current Secretary of Defense. But they also perform many activities that don’t kill anyone. Our navy helps preserve freedom of the seas with demonstration missions in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Our forces in Japan, South Korea, and Europe perform crucial deterrence missions – by being ready to defend those places if attacked. Even President Trump’s use of active duty soldiers in our cities is supposed to be to defend us from crime, not kill suspected criminals.
For much of our history, the largest part of the Army in the War Department was the Corps of Engineers, doing civil works across America. It’s still there, part of the Army and therefore part of the Department of Defense.
Changing the name of the department doesn’t make our missiles more accurate or our troops tougher. On the contrary, the new name would signal lethal intent rather than deterrence and defense.
The purpose of war is to achieve peace, not just to kill. We don’t need a Department of Peace. That’s way too soft and fuzzy. But we’re supposed to go war only in defense of our people and interests. President Trump says he wants to be a peace president and get a peace prize. Calling the Pentagon a War Department doesn’t help those optics. Let’s just keep the name we have to show that our fundamental intent is defensive, not offensive.
As Clausewitz noted, defense is not passive. It may require a steady shield of blows. But under our Constitution, those blows require congressional action that could set war aims and limits, as we have done time and again since 1789.
Under the original 1789 law, the Department of War and its Secretary of War was supposed to “perform and execute such duties as shall from time to time be enjoined on, or entrusted to him by the President” relative to the land and naval forces. Only in 1798 did Congress create a separate Department of the Navy.
In 1947, Congress voted to put the armed forces under a single Secretary of Defense but was unwilling to give him full control. Lawmakers even named the entity the National Military Establishment. That didn’t last because the inevitable acronym NME sounded too much like “enemy.” In 1949 Congress changed the name to Department of Defense and gave the secretary “authority, direction, and control” over the whole department.
The president may think he can rename things by executive orders, as he did with the “Gulf of America.” But only Congress can create departments and agencies, and only Congress can change the name to what the president might want.
If lawmakers want to preserve our international reputation as a defender against aggression by others and not an initiator of violence, they should reject any name change.