The president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been talking about the name change for months.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
“I think it’s a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now,” Trump said before signing the order at the Oval Office. “We have the strongest military in the world. We have the greatest equipment in the world.”
While the Pentagon will still be the Department of Defense—as a total renaming would require an act of Congress—the Defense Department can secondarily be referred to as the “Department of War,” and the defense secretary, currently Pete Hegseth, can go by the secondary title of “secretary of war.”
The rebranding, Hegseth said at the Oval Office, is also about restoring the warrior ethos in the country’s military.
Trump and Hegseth had been talking about the name change for months.
“Pete, you started off by saying ’the Department of Defense.’ And somehow it didn’t sound good to me,” Trump said on Aug. 25, addressing Hegseth in the Oval Office.
“Defense. What are we, defense? Why are we defense? It used to be called the Department of War, and it had a stronger sound. And, as you know, we won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything. Now we have a Department of Defense. We’re defenders. I don’t know.”
The Department of Defense was called the Department of War when it was established in 1789. In 1947, President Harry Truman changed the name after merging it with the Navy Department when he signed the National Security Act, which created the position of secretary of defense. It also created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Air Force.
Before becoming defense secretary, Hegseth called for changing the Defense Department back to its old name.
“Sure, our military defends us. And in a perfect world it exists to deter threats and preserve peace,” he wrote in his 2024 memoir, “The War on Warriors—Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”
