Department of War: What was it and why Trump rebranded Department of Defense

The section of defence testament at present be called the Department of War, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to that effect on Friday. The POTUS said it sent a ‘message of victory’ to the rest of the world.

"I think it sends a message of victory," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office about the rebranding. "It's a much more appropriate name in light of where the world is right now." While Trump can't formally change Pentagon's name without Congressional approval, his order authorizes the use of Department of War as a 'secondary title'.

Trump's new rebrand is actually a throwback to the War Department – a title used for over 150 years, from 1789, just after gaining independence from the British, to shortly after World War II.

The War Department came into being after then-President George Washington signed it into law. 'It used to oversee the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps, according to an official Pentagon history web page, but the Navy and Marines split off a decade later.

The current Department of Defense comprises of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and recently the Space Force, all of which have histories distinct from the original War Department.

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Eventually, War Department just oversaw the army, while there was a separate department for the Navy as well. However, this fragmentation was seen as a hindrance by former President Harry Truman and other military leaders. They reportedly felt that it hampered US operations during World War II, and Truman even argued that it contributed to the failure to prevent the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

“There were tremendous bureaucratic squabbles between the Army and the Navy and the emerging Air Force over the allocation of financial resources,” Vox reported Melvyn Leffler, a historian at the University of Virginia say. “Truman and his top national security advisers believed that it was essential to integrate and rationalize both national security planning and the preparation of the war plans,” she added.

The National Security Act of 1947 would combine the Army, Navy and Air Force under one department and one Cabinet Secretary. It was originally called the National Military Establishment but the name was soon changed to the Department of Defense.

Leffler told Vox that the choice of the word ‘defense’ over ‘war’ was deliberate since it came at a time when the US-Soviet Cold War was beginning and given both sides had nuclear weapons, the stakes were considerably high. “An overarching preoccupation of President Truman and his advisers was to deter future wars, rather than to wage war,” the historian noted.

Trump seemed to blame America's military misadventures since the victories in World Wars I and II on the choice to call it the Department of Defense. "We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct or wokey," he said.

The rebranding forms part of a wider bid by Trump to project power and potency at home and abroad in his second term, as part of his "Make America Great Again" policy. Trump had previously complained the current name is too ‘defensive’. "I don't want to be defense only. I want defense but I want offense too," he had said.

(With AFP inputs)

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