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The Department of Defense will soon be called the Department of War, President Donald Trump plans to announce in an executive order Friday.
The White House confirmed the new name to HuffPost on Thursday following multiple reports about the rebrand. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also appeared to confirm the new name, posting on X: “DEPARTMENT OF WAR” and linking to Fox News’ report on the new name.
“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,” according to a document The Washington Post obtained describing the order.
For now, Department of War will be a secondary name, as a unilateral name change would require an act of Congress.
A Department of War existed from 1789 to 1947 until Congress passed a law combining it with the departments of the Navy and the Air Force to create the National Military Establishment (NME). That effort was driven by then-President Harry Truman, in part to “reduce interservice rivalry which was believed to have reduced military effectiveness during World War,” according to the National Archives.
via Associated Press
But NME was an “unfortunate abbreviation” with “the obvious pronunciation being ‘enemy,’” the archives noted. In 1949, it was renamed the Department of Defense, as it’s known today.
A person familiar with the rebranding told the Post that Hegseth has been throwing around the idea since March after Trump told him at a meeting that he looked “more like a secretary of war.”
Trump, who has overseen several institutional name changes throughout his second term, began publicly floating the new name this summer, telling reporters at The White House last month that the previous name “had a stronger sound.”
“I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that. I don’t think we even need that,” he continued.
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And in June, he claimed the Department of War moniker was done away with because “we became politically correct.”
Historians say that’s not at all what happened.
“The decision was definitely not about political correctness,” military historian Richard Kohn told The New York Times last month. “It was to communicate to America’s adversaries and the rest of the world that America was not about making war but defending the United States, and saying that if that requires war, there are four major armed services.”
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