September 5, 2025 | 11:35 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - U.S. President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday, September 5, 2025, to rename the Department of Defense to the "Department of War." This was revealed by a White House official on Thursday, as reported by CNA. This move will be Trump's legacy within the largest government organization.
The order will allow Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense, and officials under it to use secondary titles such as "Secretary of War," "Department of War," and "Deputy Secretary of War" in official correspondence and public communication, according to the White House fact sheet.
The move will instruct Hegseth to recommend legislative and executive actions necessary to make the name change permanent.
Trump and Hegseth have been publicly pushing for the rebrand for weeks, claiming the change would present a more aggressive U.S. military.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was the Department of War,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, as quoted from The Guardian. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
Name changes for departments are rare and require approval from the U.S. Congress. However, Trump's Republican colleagues hold a slim majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and party leaders in congress show little interest in opposing Trump's initiative.
The U.S. Department of Defense was named the Department of War until 1949 when the U.S. Congress merged the Army, Navy, and Air Force after World War II. The name was chosen in part to signify that in the nuclear era, the U.S. focused on preventing war, according to historians.
Renaming it again would require substantial costs and necessitate updating signs and letterheads not only used by officials at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., but also by military installations worldwide.
"Why not put this money toward supporting military families or toward employing diplomats that help prevent conflicts from starting in the first place?" questioned Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, regarding Trump's plan.
"Because Trump would rather use our military to score political points than to strengthen our national security and support our brave servicemembers and their families - that's why," she said.
Long Time in the Making
This year, one of Trump's closest allies in Congress, Republican Party Chair of the House Oversight Committee James Comer, introduced a bill that would make it easier for the president to reorganize and rename agencies.
"We're just going to do it. I'm sure Congress will go along if we need that ... Defense is too defensive. We want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive too if we have to be," said Trump last month.
Trump also mentioned the possibility of a name change in June when he stated that the name was originally changed to be "politically correct."
However, for some people in the Trump administration, this effort has been long in the making.
During Trump's first term, current FBI Director Kash Patel, who once served at the Pentagon, had a signature on his emails that read: "Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense & the War Department."
"I view it as a tribute to the history and heritage of the Department of Defense," Patel said in 2021.
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