Senior Pentagon officials are racing to comply with President Donald Trump’s new executive order which would rebrand the US Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” setting off confusion, frustration and alarm among top staff members.
Signed on Friday, the order would rename the massive department which commands the US military all over the world back to a name it had not used in more than seven decades.
Officials are warning it could cost billions to implement, while doing little to grapple with America’s most serious security problems like the growing assertiveness of China and Russia.
More than 700,000 facilities in 40 countries and all 50 states may be affected by the change, according to people familiar with the matter.
Anything and everything from the Pentagon’s official seals and letterhead to uniforms, dining hall napkins, online domains and even gift shop mugs could need replacing.
“This is being done for domestic political audiences. Not only will this cost millions, it will have no impact whatsoever on Chinese or Russian calculations. Worse, it will be weaponised by our enemies to paint the US as warmongering and a threat to international stability,” said one former defense official.
The White House has confirmed the Pentagon’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will now be referred to as the “Secretary of War” in official communications. A fact sheet from the White House states that “Department of War” can also be used as a secondary name for the department, giving the administration some room to move without requiring congressional approval.
Trump defended the change at a press conference from the Oval Office.
“We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to DoD. So we’re going Department of War,” the president said.
Republican and Democratic critics have questioned the decision’s value, with some calling for the administration to reverse course.
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement that: “If we call it the Department of War, we’d better equip the military to actually prevent and win wars. Peace through strength requires investment, not just rebranding.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also criticised the move, saying the change was “nothing more than an effort to distract from other issues that are going on in the country”.
The US War Department existed from America’s independence until 1947 when President Truman reorganised the military. The “Department of War” was then replaced with the Department of Defense through an Act of Congress in 1949.
Since Friday, there has been a clear lack of coordination at the Pentagon over the change. The official Pentagon website was briefly redirected from defense.gov to war.gov, which went offline. Pentagon staff bickered over ownership of a “Department of War” LinkedIn page. The Pentagon’s X (formerly Twitter) account even changed its avatar but not its banner logo.
“The tactical level implications are staggering — imagine the cost of rebranding all the contracting, marketing and development materials the DoD has to work with,” said a defence consultant. “Strategically, I think it could also raise new questions among allies and adversaries about what it means to support the Department of War. It is a far more belligerent label than ‘Defense’.”
