President Trump on Monday floated returning the Department of Defense to its prior name, the Department of War — arguing the name it has held since the 1940s is “too defensive.”
“We want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too, if we have to be,” the president told reporters during a Monday afternoon Oval Office event.
Mr. Trump tested out the Department of War moniker during a series of public events at the White House on Monday, including a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. He argued that the United States had an “unbelievable history of victory” under the department’s old name, referring to World War I and World War II.
The president said earlier Monday the change would likely be made “over the next week or so.” Hours later, he said he’d leave it up to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “We’ll do it a couple of more times. And if everyone likes it, we’ll make that change.”
Asked whether Congress would need to sign off on restoring the agency’s old name, since lawmakers had passed the initial renaming, Mr. Trump said he didn’t think so: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t think we even need that.”
The president has teased a name change for the federal government’s largest agency on and off for months, referring to Hegseth as his “Secretary of War” at one point last month in a post on Truth Social. During a June press conference, he claimed the old Department of War moniker was abandoned because “we became politically correct.”
Why was the Department of War changed to the Department of Defense?
The renaming took place in the wake of World War II, part of a broader reorganization of the U.S. military that placed the Army and Navy into a single Cabinet-level agency.
The War Department — which oversaw the Army — dated back to President George Washington’s first term, but in the late 1790s, Congress created a separate Navy Department to oversee the new country’s naval forces and, later, the Marine Corps. Those two agencies operated separately for over a century.
President Harry Truman pushed for different branches of service to be combined into a single Department of National Defense in 1947, telling Congress the move was necessary to “cut costs and at the same time enhance our national security.”
The agencies were combined under a single Secretary of Defense in a 1947 law that also created the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Two years later, Congress named the agency the Department of Defense.