Department of War: The Name Fits

Key Points and Summary – On Sept. 5, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War, citing history and a broader view of warfare.

-This op-ed argues the change is overdue honesty: since 1949, most U.S. interventions—from Bosnia and Kosovo to Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the strike on Iran—were offensive wars of choice, not defense.

-Even Afghanistan morphed into nation-building.

-The author warns today’s proxy fight with nuclear-armed Russia is riskier still.

-Critics fault Trump for bypassing Congress and stoking belligerence—especially after a Venezuelan interdiction—but the essay concludes the new name better matches U.S. behavior.

Department of War: What’s In a Name? 

On Sept. 5, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. In doing so, the president revived the name that the department used from the approval of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 until bureaucratic reorganizations after World War II produced the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1949. Trump’s apparent motive was a combination of nostalgia about America’s decisive military victories during that earlier era and a desire to expand the scope of what qualifies as warfare.

Despite such questionable motives, the name change is warranted. Given Washington’s conduct in recent decades, use of the word “Defense” is a case of deceptive labeling, if not outright fraud. Very few of the conflicts the U.S. military has waged since 1949 even arguably involve cases of genuine national defense. Even the editorial board of the Washington Post now concedes that the term Department of Defense has long been a “euphemism.”

That’s putting it mildly. The vast majority of U.S. military initiatives since 1949 have been offensive wars of choice undertaken by a cynical U.S. political and military elite. Some military interventions have constituted brazen, shameful cases of aggression. To contend that such conflicts were undertaken by a cabinet department devoted to defending the American people is Orwellian. Indeed, some of Washington’s wars might even make the lead characters in a George Orwell novel blush from embarrassment.

For example, it was preposterous to contend that Bosnian Serbs trying to salvage what little political self-determination they could from a disintegrating Yugoslavia in the 1990s somehow posed a threat to the American people. Yet that reality did not inhibit the United States from intervening in an internecine conflict 5,000 miles from the American homeland to bomb the Bosnian Serbs into submission. A few years later, the United States and its NATO allies bombed Serbia itself (a full-fledged fellow member of the United Nations) and seized the country’s Kosovo province. Again, Serbia had never attacked or even hinted at attacking America, yet Washington executed a territorial change by force—ironically, what U.S. leaders now vehemently denounce Russia for doing to Ukraine.

One also could ask how tiny Lebanon’s civil war in the early 1980s posed such a threat to America’s security that it warranted having the DoD send thousands of U.S. troops to the war zone. After conducting air and artillery strikes that killed hundreds of Lebanese villagers, the tragedy culminated when insurgents retaliated by detonating bombs in the Marine barracks outside Beirut, killing 241 American military personnel. The United States then quietly exited the Lebanon conflict. Apparently, Washington’s military mission wasn’t essential to the safety of the American people after all.

The justifications for other U.S. wars since the adoption of the DoD name are nearly as weak. For example, the only way to justify the Korea and Vietnam wars as U.S. defensive actions is to portray North Korea and North Vietnam as nothing more than appendages of a global, powerful, monolithic communist threat. That argument was simplistic and ahistorical when it was first made; it has been shown to be utter nonsense in the decades since then. Yet tens of thousands of American soldiers perished in those military crusades.

Only the initial U.S. military response to the attacks on September 11, 2001, can be justified as a defensive war. And one needs to use an asterisk even with that episode. It’s hard to isolate the 9-11 attacks from Washington’s aggressive behavior throughout the Muslim world over the previous half century. Moreover, the retaliatory strike on Afghanistan for hosting the 9-11 terrorists became a pretext for a vast counterinsurgency, nation-building mission that lasted nearly two decades. There was nothing genuinely defensive about such a long, bloody, imperialist mission.

The other wars that Washington launched in the Muslim world did not have even a plausible defensive justification. President Barack Obama’s military actions against Libya, Syria, and Yemen were devoid of any credible argument that they were necessary for America’s defense. Those interventions also made matters worse for the hapless victims of Washington’s imperialistic hubris. President Trump’s later decision to bomb Iran also was pure aggression, not defense.

Until recently, the offensive wars that various administrations have undertaken over the decades since the end of World War II, while usually unnecessary and often odious, have not put the American homeland in undue danger. Washington’s opponents were relatively weak militarily, and their geographic reach was decidedly limited. But President Joe Biden’s fateful decision to join NATO’s proxy war to weaken Russia in Ukraine involves a much greater level of risk.

Washington’s opponent in this case is not some weak, Third World country; it is a major power with nearly 6,000 nuclear weapons—many of them perched on missiles capable of reaching targets anywhere in the United States. Whatever Moscow’s guilt in using military force against Ukraine, the Russian Federation has not attacked the United States. The ongoing proxy war is yet another offensive operation by the so-called U.S. Defense Department.

Trump’s action on the name change has received widespread condemnation for two reasons. First, he used an executive order to make the change instead of seeking congressional approval via statute—the method that had been used to officially establish the Department of Defense. Resorting to an executive order reinforced mounting complaints that Trump was behaving like an autocrat. In addition, embracing the War Department label reinforced the impression that the current occupant of the White House wants the United States to behave in a more belligerent manner internationally. Signing the executive order shortly after the U.S. military sank a Venezuelan boat merely on the suspicion that it was trafficking illegal drugs strengthened that impression.

Even so, the name change is a step toward greater honesty. Americans will no longer be able to pretend that their aggressive, globe-girdling war apparatus is merely an inescapable necessity to defend the innocent republic from aggression.

About the Author: Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at The National Security Journal.  He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

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