{"id":29828,"date":"2025-09-10T07:05:59","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T11:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/war-departments-name-change-from-defense-highlights-congresss-failures\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T07:05:59","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T11:05:59","slug":"war-departments-name-change-from-defense-highlights-congresss-failures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/war-departments-name-change-from-defense-highlights-congresss-failures\/","title":{"rendered":"War Department’s Name Change From Defense Highlights Congress’s Failures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump rechristened<\/a> the Department of Defense as the War Department. To drive the point home, the White House X account shared an image<\/a> of the president squatting in sunglasses and a cavalry hat against a backdrop of helicopters, explosions, and the Chicago skyline\u2014a parody of the film Apocalypse Now<\/em>. The caption read, \u201c\u2018I love the smell of deportations in the morning\u2026\u2019 Chicago [sic] about to find out why it\u2019s called the Department of War.\u201d<\/p>\n

That same week the U.S. military killed the crew<\/a> of an alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat in international waters. Asked on X whether the strike amounted to a war crime, the vice president, a Yale-trained lawyer, replied<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t give a shit what you call it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump rechristened<\/a> the Department of Defense as the War Department. To drive the point home, the White House X account shared an image<\/a> of the president squatting in sunglasses and a cavalry hat against a backdrop of helicopters, explosions, and the Chicago skyline\u2014a parody of the film Apocalypse Now<\/em>. The caption read, \u201c\u2018I love the smell of deportations in the morning\u2026\u2019 Chicago [sic] about to find out why it\u2019s called the Department of War.\u201d<\/p>\n

That same week the U.S. military killed the crew<\/a> of an alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat in international waters. Asked on X whether the strike amounted to a war crime, the vice president, a Yale-trained lawyer, replied<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t give a shit what you call it.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, it wasn\u2019t Trump\u2019s drone strike that drew the most ire but his decision to rename the Department of Defense. To be clear, the executive order directs the government to use \u201cDepartment of War\u201d and \u201cSecretary of War\u201d as secondary titles, but they are effectively the primary names. Stripping out \u201cDepartment of Defense\u201d entirely will require Congress to pass legislation. Maybe lawmakers will oblige, but at this point it\u2019s almost a distinction without a difference. After all, why would a president wait on Congress for a name change when they don\u2019t wait on Congress to wage acts of war abroad? Congressional action in matters of defense has increasingly been reduced to technicalities and messaging, apart from the entropic spending packages it passes.<\/p>\n

The Department of War was created in 1789, overseeing the U.S. Army and later the Army Air Forces, while the Department of the Navy handled the fleet. In 1947, the War Department was split into the departments of the Army and Air Force, with the new Defense Department, given its eventual name in 1949, created as an umbrella agency overseeing all the armed forces. Trump\u2019s move is less a restoration than a renaming, justified, according to his executive order<\/a>, because it supposedly \u201censures peace through strength.\u201d<\/p>\n

As one commentator in the Atlantic<\/em> rightly noted<\/a>, the first name change from War Department to Defense Department recognized that there was a lot more to the defense of the nation than simply fighting wars and that reversing it now will waste a huge amount of money in administrative costs all in the name of cringey semantics. Wasting millions of dollars on a useless Pentagon activity might turn more heads if it weren\u2019t so commonplace.<\/p>\n

Yet criticism should also acknowledge that the Department of Defense has been behaving like a Department of War for quite a long time\u2014much of it overseen and enabled by graduates of the same elite institutions that produced the vice president. John Yoo<\/a>, architect of the George W. Bush administration\u2019s torture memos<\/a>, is a fellow Yale Law alumnus. John Ashcroft, who defended them as attorney general, studied at Yale and the University of Chicago. Alberto Gonzales, another Bush attorney general, trained at Harvard before dismissing parts of the Geneva Conventions<\/a> as \u201cquaint\u201d and \u201cobsolete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under President Barack Obama, Martin Lederman, who studied law at Yale, and David Barron, who studied at Harvard, authored the memo<\/a> justifying the unprecedented drone strike on U.S. citizen and alleged al Qaeda member Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, followed two weeks later by a strike that killed his 16-year-old American son. When asked about the boy\u2019s death, former White House press secretary and senior campaign advisor Robert Gibbs remarked<\/a> that the teenager \u201cshould have [had] a far more responsible father.\u201d<\/p>\n

So why would the vice president \u201cgive a shit\u201d whether the extraterritorial killing of alleged drug traffickers in open waters qualifies as a war crime? To be fair, the former officials I\u2019ve named grappled with unprecedented policy questions, charged with protecting the homeland following 9\/11 and making choices few would envy. And yes, elite institutions have also produced champions of humanitarian law and military oversight. But the notion that the ideas circulating in Trump\u2019s Pentagon are some aberrant break from the norm is a self-serving myth.<\/p>\n

If Congress wanted the \u201cDepartment of War\u201d to live up to the more palatable \u201cdefense\u201d moniker, it\u2019s had ample chances. Instead, lawmakers have ceded their constitutional war powers, allowing presidents of both parties to launch military action without approval. The Obama administration\u2019s 2011 airstrikes against the Qaddafi regime<\/a> in Libya, Trump\u2019s 2020 assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani in Iraq, and Bill Clinton\u2019s 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo\u2014initiated before Congress weighed in<\/a>\u2014are just three examples.<\/p>\n

Each produced significant regional and political consequences, in some cases arguably leading to the loss of U.S. life, while relying on Article II authorities<\/a> and expansive interpretations<\/a> of earlier congressional authorizations, effectively making Congress\u2019s voice irrelevant. Oversight has amounted to little more than partisan scolding when the other side controls the White House. The one constant has been the steady expansion of presidential war-making authority\u2014perhaps now too entrenched to undo.<\/p>\n

The U.S. airstrikes on Iran<\/a> in June are only the latest example. A Senate motion<\/a> (S.J. Res. 59) to invoke the War Powers Resolution and withdraw U.S. forces from unauthorized hostilities against Iran failed 47-53; the House never even voted. Congress has also repeatedly balked at repealing outdated Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs)\u2014passed in 1991<\/a>, 2001<\/a>, and 2002<\/a>\u2014that have been stretched far beyond their original purposes. These AUMFs, particularly those created at the inception of the global war on terror (GWOT), have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve recently argued, the rhetoric, imagery, and, perhaps most disturbingly, the tactics that defined Washington\u2019s wars of choice abroad, especially during the GWOT era, are coming home. Last weekend they did again, in the form of Trump\u2019s Apocalypse Now<\/em> meme. It looked less like political messaging than a propaganda flyer one might drop to demoralize an enemy city. Only this time, the target was Chicago.<\/p>\n

The imagery was grotesque, and partisan outrage followed. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote<\/a> on X that the \u201cPresident of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.\u201d House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed<\/a> the charge. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a decorated Army veteran, accused<\/a> Trump of stolen valor for having his (likely AI-generated) cavalry hat.<\/p>\n

But this chorus of condemnation largely missed the point. Trump is not literally declaring war on Chicago. He is vulgarly signaling his intent to deploy U.S. troops to assist other agencies in carrying out mass deportations, in the same way as efforts underway<\/a> in Washington, D.C. The meme succeeded in rallying supporters behind the policy while baiting opponents into focusing on optics rather than the duty to oversee how the U.S. military is used. And in the noise, what gets lost? Any serious oversight of how the U.S. military is deployed abroad or at home.<\/p>\n

Lawmakers and commentators may profess outrage over last week\u2019s events. However, for a quarter-century, the Department of Defense and other agencies waged undeclared wars and carried out lethal strikes across the globe while Congress abdicated oversight, pundits cheered, critics were derided as unserious, and presidential power over who lives, who dies, and who is locked away at Guant\u00e1namo hardened into something close to absolute.<\/p>\n

Now we\u2019ve arrived at the destination that was locked in all along: The White House is crudely telling us that it can do whatever it wants with the U.S. military, and nobody can restrain it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump rechristened the Department of Defense as the War Department. To drive the point home, the White House X account shared an image of the president squatting in sunglasses and a cavalry hat against a backdrop of helicopters, explosions, and the Chicago skyline\u2014a parody of the film Apocalypse Now. 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