Trump to sign order renaming Pentagon ‘Department of War’: Sources
Trump has said multiple times he doesn’t believe the name “Department of Defense” is strong enough.
“It used to be called the Department of War. And it had a stronger sound … We have a Department of Defense. We’re defenders,” Trump said during an executive order signing in the Oval Office last week, surrounded by a number of his Cabinet officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
In 1789, the Department of War was created by Congress to oversee the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy was later separated into its own department.
After World War II, President Harry Truman put all armed forces under one organization that was renamed the Department of Defense.
“It was clear from World War II that warfare was going to be joint and combined, so it was just necessary … It was clear to some as early as the 1930s that you would have to integrate military affairs and war and preparations for war, the Treasury Department” with “intelligence, allied policy issues and domestic industrial policy,” said Richard Kohn, a professor of military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In other words, fighting a war became about more than just war, Kohn said, and the Truman administration wanted a broader agency to encompass all of that.
Additionally, “defense was what was talked about in the 1940s, not just war-making,” Kohn said.