The Department of Defense will soon officially become the Department of War, if Republicans get their way. Key committees in the House and Senate have approved the name change, and Donald Trump is eager to sign it into law. The rebranding is candid and ominous, offering a future of heightened zeal for killing, maiming and destroying.
Christened in 1949, the Department of Defense unified the military branches with the Pentagon as their headquarters. Since then, presidents have routinely promoted each new war as vital for the defense of the United States and its values, a pretense that has pervaded mainstream media and political discourse.
Belief in that pretense has now hit bottom, with US public support for this year’s war on Iran extraordinarily low from the outset. But Trump, defense secretary Pete Hegseth and their underlings are doing what they can to inculcate the idea that US warfare is not just superbly laudable but also inevitable. The unabashed fervor for catastrophic violence is fueling the momentum to replace “defense” with “war” department.
A switch to Department of War would undermine some of the deceptive marketing that has been central to the Department of Defense brand. Along the way, the new name could make it more difficult to perpetuate the assumption that US military actions spring from admirable motives.
Politicians and journalists drag the public down a misleading rabbit hole when they habitually refer to “defense spending” and a “defense budget”. Even antiwar activists do the same as they advocate for cutting the “defense” budget and thus – given the positive connotations of the word – undercut their position from the outset.
Of course, we can’t blame the sloppy and manipulative uses of the word “defense” for the illusions that drive public support for US foreign policy. But as George Orwell pointed out: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
The plan to go with the Department of War is a symptom of what Martin Luther King Jr called “the madness of militarism”. Over time, the name change would further normalize such madness.
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The Department of Defense has always functioned as the ultimate blunt instrument of a warfare state bent on leading the global arms race while frequently engaging in wars of aggression. Euphemisms like “defense”, in tandem with lofty rhetoric about seeking peace or spreading democracy, never spared anyone from the lethality of Pentagon firepower.
Boilerplate claims of peaceful intent have been automatic. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on 10 August 1964, greenlighting escalation of the Vietnam war that was to take an estimated 3.8 million lives, he declared: “Our one desire – our one determination – is that the people of south-east Asia be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way.”
Fast forward to late January 2003. “We seek peace,” President George W Bush proclaimed in a State of the Union address weeks before the invasion of Iraq. “We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended.”
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Endless words from Washington about defense and peace were of no consequence to Guljumma, a seven-year-old girl I met inside a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul in the late summer of 2009. Nor did she have the slightest interest in knowing the name of the department that had overseen the bombing of her neighborhood early one morning in Helmand province. Regardless of President Barack Obama’s eloquence, some in her family died and she lost an arm.
In contrast to his predecessors, Trump is often quite open about his enthusiasm for the tremendous violence of war, and Hegseth sounds proudly bloodthirsty while touting “the warrior ethos”. They convey an approach akin to seeing the world as an ongoing humongous cage fight.
And yet, as singularly awful as the crassly extreme militarism of the Trump regime is – complete with an unhinged push for a 50% increase in the already hyper-bloated military budget – the continuity with previous decades is a reality. Every president in the last 80 years has mouthed platitudes about defense and peace, while gunning the most destructive war machinery on the planet.
Last week, the ranking member and former chair of the House armed services committee, Democrat Adam Smith, called the move for the Department of War name “one of the dumbest things that has been done by this administration”. Smith was among 81 House Democrats who in October 2002 voted in favor of a resolution for the US to invade Iraq. So far, in the current election cycle, his haul of campaign contributions is more than $1.1m, while the biggest sector is listed as “defense”.
The Trump regime is tweaking the business-as-usual of the military-industrial complex. True, shamelessly bellicose rhetoric has dispensed with the usual window-dressing for warmaking, and many find the verbal recklessness to be disquieting. But actual military policies are hardly a major departure from longstanding American approaches to war and peace.
In US statecraft and warcraft, Trump and Hegseth are now saying previously quiet parts out loud. They boast that might makes right and the United States is by far the mightiest.
“I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right,” Senator Wayne Morse said more than 60 years ago, while denouncing the war in Vietnam as it escalated. Since then, the names of many other countries have given the lie to the name Department of Defense, including the Dominican Republic, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Iran.
Whatever its name might be, the department in charge of making war for the US government is tasked with serving a proud legacy of mega-violence that has already led to several million deaths and vast destruction in this century.
