Trump wants to rename the Pentagon the Department of War

The US President Donald Trump said on August 25 that his administration will likely change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War in the coming week.

Politico writes about this.

Both he and the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has promised to restore the departmentʼs "war spirit" — have repeatedly lamented the name change that took place after World War II.

"When we won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War. And to me, thatʼs what it is. Everybody loved that we had an incredible history of victories when it was the Department of War. Then we renamed it the Department of Defense," Trump said at a press conference with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

The United States Department of War existed from 1789 to 1947, when the administration of the 33rd US President Harry Truman divided the department into the Army and Air Force, and also merged it with the then independent Navy.

Truman aimed to give the head of the Pentagon more centralized authority over individual branches of the military, especially the navy, which had retained considerable autonomy until the end of World War II.

In recent weeks, Trump has hinted at the possibility of returning to the old name, calling Hegseth his "Secretary of War" at a NATO summit in June and claiming that political correctness was the reason for the change.

“If you look at the old building near the White House, you can see that it used to say ʼDepartment of War’. And then we got politically correct and called it the Department of Defense,” he said.

The US president has hinted that the renaming will happen soon. But the Pentagon will likely have to get congressional approval, as the agency was created by law decades ago.

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