He’s febrile and stimulated about killing his enemies, foreign and domestic. And that means pretty much all those who aren’t crawling on their bellies to pledge fealty and lick his boots.
Trump says that the U.S has lost every war since WWII. (I guess the Cold War is chopped liver — but then he loves Russia, so I guess that was a loss in his mind too.) And it’s all because we went “wokey.” He’s apparently referring to that hippie Harry Truman who desegregated the armed services. If he has his way he’d reverse that order too, no doubt.
Garrett Graff wrote about about how Trump is tearing down the entire post-war order in a great piece in his newsletter (highly recommended.)
The DoD name change hits at two of my consistent themes: Trump’s utter incurious lack of understanding history and the dismantling of the institutions built and tended by the Greatest Generation.
The War Department was one of the first parts of the US government, dating back to 1798, but what it really oversaw was just the army; there was a separate Department of the Navy, which was also established in 1798, was the only military branch specifically authorized in the Constitution, by Article I, Section 8, and which also oversaw the Marines Corps. The Founders were, for obvious reasons, deeply wary of standing armies, and so the goal and plan for most of the country’s history was that while we always had a Department of the Navy chugging along, the “War Department” shrunk down massively in peacetime and only really bulked up during, well, an actual war. At the end of the 1800s, the US army was just 39,000 people — about 1/12th the size of the French army — and even on the eve of World War II, the US army ranked only 19th in the world, smaller than the standing army of Portugal.
It was after World War II that the US began to think differently about its world obligations and what that meant for the military. Part of the problem was that there was no combined authority who oversaw the whole military other than the commander-in-chief himself — through the war, the army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, and chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, were co-equals, reporting to separate secretaries, War Secretary Henry Stimson and Navy Secretary Frank Knox and, after 1944, James Forrestal. It didn’t make for a very smooth coordinated operation, since the different services and departments had different service priorities.
After the war, policymakers began to talk about a new concept they called “national security.” As I wrote in my book RAVEN ROCK, previous generations of policymakers had used terms like “national interest” or “national defense,” but the idea of “national security” presaged something bigger and grander: It wasn’t enough to be confident that an enemy could be stopped at the border — the United States needed to engage with the world beyond and stop threats long before they reached our shores. “Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front. I am using the word ‘security’ here consistently and continuously rather than ‘defense,’” Navy Secretary James Forrestal explained in one 1945 congressional hearing.
“I like your words ‘national security,’” Senator Edwin Johnson responded.
As the Cold War started, Congress passed the National Security Act of 1947, which created a unified structure known as the National Military Establishment, which brought together the War Department and the Navy Department, created a new Department of the Air Force, as well created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, the CIA, and other hallmarks of our postwar national security apparatus. For the first time, all of the nation’s armed services were under the same roof and authority. Two years later, the so-called “NME” was renamed officially the Department of Defense, in part — allegedly — because the acronym sounded too much like the word “enemy.”
The Department of Defense was something new — it wasn’t “just” a new name for the Department of War. It was fundamentally different, had a different posture, and was meant to capture a different, larger role for the United States in the world. Changing the name to the “War Department” simply because Trump thinks it sounds cooler is a complete waste of everyone’s time and energy — and, moreover, seems certain to make the US less safe, as the aggressiveness of the new name seems certain to only underscore our adversaries’ worst fears about us.
Devolving the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of War” feels like renaming the “Transcontinental Railroad” to the “Pony Express.” Sure, they’re both “ways to send news and information across the country,” but it’s a term from a different era that referred to a different, lesser thing entirely. Maybe more romantic? Maybe. But also anachronistic and incomplete.
Yes, it’s ahistorical. anachronistic and incomplete to say the least. And mind bogglingly stupid. Here’s our “Secretary of War”:
Hegseth: The war department is going to fight decisively, not endless conflicts. It’s going to fight to win, not not to lose. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.
Hooah…