S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Why Trump's move to rename the Department of Defense is both wrong and ahistorical, plus a look at the world's top five geopolitical danger zones.

Garrett Graff
September 05, 2025 • Reading Time: 19 minutes

Why It's Not the War Department

Today, at some point, Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order that requires officials in the executive branch to refer to the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Note my phrasing: What he's doing is far different and more performative than what most of the news headlines and outlets reported — mainly that he was renaming the Defense Department as the War Department.

He can't do that; the Department of Defense was created in statute by Congress and renaming it would require an act of Congress. Instead, he's inventing some new strange process that allows "secondary names" and that applies only to the executive branch. This is the "Gulf of America" but for the nation's warfighters.

I found the coverage last night of the name change particularlygalling; indeed much of the media's coverage of Trump's second term executive orders has been uniquely terrible and credulous. I said early this year that Trump has basically figured out that Executive Orders are tweets that get bigger headlines. It seems almost every time the president signs one, the media makes it seem like it has the full force of law, when they absolutely do not.

In this case, Trump appears at some point in August to have decided that the "Department of War" sounds more masculine and tougher and has just days later plowed ahead with a time-consuming and wasteful effort — just imagine how much stationary and how many business cards the Pentagon is going to have to reprint! — to appease his own sense of what the country should be.

The comments about the name change keep saying things like "the department was previously called the Department of War until World War II" or "the name reverts to what it was called through World War II," but that's just plain wrong, and I wanted to take some time today to explain not only why it's wrong but why it matters that it's wrong.

It's worth pausing at the start to note how the attempt to rename the Pentagon fits into the broader classic authoritarian frame of how Trump is corrupting and personalizing the military — one of the few still widely respected institutions in American life — in ways that will be very hard to undo. From firing top commanders, mostly women and minorities, and installing handpicked leaders like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who don't have the most basic normal requirements of the role, to deploying National Guard troops to police American cities against the will of local citizens, we're watching a genuine crisis in "civil-military relations" unfold.

The DoD name change hits at two of my consistent themes: Trump's utter incurious lack of understanding history and the dismantling of the institutions built and tended by the Greatest Generation.

The War Department was one of the first parts of the US government, dating back to 1798, but what it really oversaw was just the army; there was a separate Department of the Navy, which was also established in 1798, was the only military branch specifically authorized in the Constitution, by Article I, Section 8, and which also oversaw the Marines Corps. The Founders were, for obvious reasons, deeply wary of standing armies, and so the goal and plan for most of the country's history was that while we always had a Department of the Navy chugging along, the "War Department" shrunk down massively in peacetime and only really bulked up during, well, an actual war. At the end of the 1800s, the US army was just 39,000 people — about 1/12^th the size of the French army — and even on the eve of World War II, the US army ranked only 19^th in the world, smaller than the standing army of Portugal.

It was after World War II that the US began to think differently about its world obligations and what that meant for the military. Part of the problem was that there was no combined authority who oversaw the whole military other than the commander-in-chief himself — through the war, the army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, and chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, were co-equals, reporting to separate secretaries, War Secretary Henry Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox and, after 1944, James Forrestal. It didn't make for a very smooth coordinated operation, since the different services and departments had different service priorities.

The temporary wartime headquarters of the Navy and War Departments on the National Mall in World War I.

After the war, policymakers began to talk about a new concept they called "national security." As I wrote in my book RAVEN ROCK, previous generations of policymakers had used terms like "national interest" or "national defense," but the idea of "national security" presaged something bigger and grander: It wasn't enough to be confident that an enemy could be stopped at the border — the United States needed to engage with the world beyond and stop threats long before they reached our shores. "Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front. I am using the word 'security' here consistently and continuously rather than 'defense,'" Navy Secretary James Forrestal explained in one 1945 congressional hearing.

"I like your words 'national security,'" Senator Edwin Johnson responded.

As the Cold War started, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, which created a unified structure known as the National Military Establishment, which brought together the War Department and the Navy Department, created a new Department of the Air Force, as well created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, the CIA, and other hallmarks of our postwar national security apparatus. For the first time, all of the nation's armed services were under the same roof and authority. Two years later, the so-called "NME" was renamed officially the Department of Defense, in part — allegedly — because the acronym sounded too much like the word "enemy."

The Department of Defense was something new — it wasn't "just" a new name for the Department of War. It was fundamentally different, had a different posture, and was meant to capture a different, larger role for the United States in the world. Changing the name to the "War Department" simply because Trump thinks it sounds cooler is a complete waste of everyone's time and energy — and, moreover, seems certain to make the US less safe, as the aggressiveness of the new name seems certain to only underscore our adversaries' worst fears about us.

Devolving the "Department of Defense" to the "Department of War" feels like renaming the "Transcontinental Railroad" to the "Pony Express." Sure, they're both "ways to send news and information across the country," but it's a term from a different era that referred to a different, lesser thing entirely. Maybe more romantic? Maybe. But also anachronistic and incomplete.

One thing that should worry us from this episode — and that we should talk about more — is how clear it is that Trump operates without guardrails in this second term. Trump's latest hare-brained and wasteful idea to rename DoD is exactly the type of thing that the "grown-ups" in the first term would have been able to redirect, stymie, and slow-roll, but in this second term it now goes from "random musing" to "mad king edict" in just a matter of days. We saw a similar evolution throughout August as the federal takeover of DC and the deployment of National Guard troops steadily escalated and now seems, as early as even today perhaps, to expand to other hostile military-backed invasions of cities like Chicago. There is no one left in Trump's orbit to turn the temperature down. That should worry us greatly both in international affairs and domestic concerns.

Which brings me to a second topic — what wars the US might actually face in the months and years ahead.