Hegseth and trump - and other chickenhawk Republicans - want to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War mostly because the Ministry of Peace (MiniPax) was already copyrighted.
As Tom Nichols at the Altantic notes, this is all ego-stroking and a waste of time (paywalled):
Last month, when the plan was still just a hypothetical, the president was asked why he favored it. He said that Department of War “just sounded better” and that it would be a callback to the name under which U.S. forces fought in the two world wars. But the change is also a reflection of how much Trump and Secretary of Defense (his title for now) Pete Hegseth think of themselves as tough guys, real fighters who will no longer trifle with silly names about “defending” things. Hegseth in particular is obsessed with “warfighters”—a clunky Pentagon term that’s been around for far too long—who will engage in “warfighting” with great “lethality.”
Both men seem to think that wimps cower and defend, but real men go on the offensive and whack the bad guys...
It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history...
These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
Defense is a serious job for a nation to uphold, and these clowns can't accept it. Gods help us.
Update: Ron Filipkowski knows exactly why Hegseth is so giddy about being a warmonger.
And there it is …
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) September 5, 2025 at 6:09 PM
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We are being led by five-year-olds eager to throw punches at the world and making us take the body blows. Considering the recent violation of international waters and the ongoing harassment of nations over tariffs and bullying Denmark over Greenland, we're going to be in a shooting war sooner rather than later. And the US military is going to get mismanaged into disaster after disaster.
I keep saying this: We are royally fucking screwed.
1 comment:
...Aaaand they didn't even really do that because they can't. The EO requires that the government respond to the titles "Department of War" and "Secretary of War" as if they were the actual titles, which can't be changed without an act of congress. George Conway, who sucks mightily, said that Hegseth's title should be changed to "Secretary of DeWars"...
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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