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Washington — President Trump will sign an executive order Friday to start the process of renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War, restoring a name the agency last held in the late 1940s, a White House official confirmed to CBS News.
The executive order will allow the DOD to start using the term Department of War as a “secondary title,” and will let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth use the title Secretary of War, according to a fact sheet obtained by CBS News. Other government agencies will be directed to “recognize and accommodate” those secondary titles.
The order will also instruct Hegseth to recommend “legislative and executive actions” to make the renaming effort permanent. The Pentagon is currently officially referred to as the Department of Defense in federal law.
The executive order was first reported by Fox News Digital.
The White House’s fact sheet argues the term Department of War “conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve” than the agency’s existing name.
“The United States military is the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world, and the President believes this Department should have a name that reflects its unmatched power and readiness to protect national interests,” the fact sheet reads.
The White House didn’t immediately provide any information on how much a permanent renaming might cost, as everything from vehicles and stationary to email addresses and clothing would have to be redone.
Mr. Trump has floated renaming the department for months, telling reporters last week the Department of Defense moniker is “too defensive.”
“We want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too, if we have to be,” the president said.
In June, the president claimed the name was changed because “we became politically correct.”
When did the Department of War change to the Department of Defense?
The department changed its name in the late 1940s, part of a larger post-World War II effort to reorganize the nation’s military bureaucracy, cut redundancies and remove references to “war” after two deadly worldwide battles.
Beginning in the 1790s, the U.S. military was split into two Cabinet-level agencies: a War Department that oversaw the Army, and a Navy Department that oversaw naval forces and the Marine Corps. But in the wake of World War II, President Harry Truman pushed Congress to combine the agencies, aiming to “cut costs and at the same time enhance our national security.”
The two departments were merged into a single entity under a Secretary of Defense in 1947, and in 1949, that combined agency was named the Department of Defense.
