As Pete Hegseth, whose current job title is Secretary of Defense, wrapped up a day trip to Fort Benning on Thursday, he turned to a group of reporters who had joined him and said: “Thank you for traveling with the War Department.”
It was a wink-and-a-nod acknowledgement of one of the Pentagon’s most poorly kept recent secrets, that Hegseth and President Donald Trump would like to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
Within an hour of Hegseth’s hint, Trump announced that he was formally launching an effort to rebrand the agency.
Whether or not he can is unclear.
A president cannot formally rename a department in the Executive Branch, which are created and funded by Congress. A formal rebrand of any department would require Congressional legislation.
Congress changed the name of the Veterans Administration to the Department of Veterans Affairs in 1988 when it elevated the then-independent agency to a cabinet-level department.
A new name across the U.S. military would mean a massive overhaul of literally millions of documents and many thousands of signs, memos, job titles, and countless other references to the Defense Department in memos, official manuals, and online links.
“The DOD has been writing things now for 70-some-odd years. That’s a large volume of stuff and labels, and for God help us web links,” said Wayne Lee, a military history professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
When the congressionally mandated Naming Commission swapped names of Army bases honoring Confederate leaders, the cost of those changes was estimated at $62.5 million, a number that could be an order of magnitude below any full rebrand of the entire DOD.
Or DOW.
While some administration officials have trumpeted the plan as a return to a previous name, only the Army was ever formally referred to as the War Department.
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“There was never a unified cabinet-level defense secretary of war. There was a secretary of war, but that was the secretary of the Army,” Lee tod Task & Purpose last week. “The War Department did not run the nation’s wars. It ran the nation’s Army at war.”
The original War Department was established in 1789 by President George Washington who nominated Henry Knox as the first secretary of war under the Articles of Confederation.
Notably, the Navy and Marine Corps were never under the War Department but instead were in the seperate Department of the Navy, according to a U.S. Navy history. All military branches were put into a new branch by the National Security Act in July 1947 under a civilian defense secretary. The act also created the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Security Resources Board, according to a Pentagon history page.
