New Delhi: US President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order Friday renaming the Department of Defence the ‘Department of War’, in a move aimed at projecting a more assertive image of the US military.
The order, as per a White House fact sheet, authorises Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials to use titles like ‘Secretary of War’, ‘Department of War’ and ‘Deputy Secretary of War’ in official and public communications. The executive order also directs Hegseth to propose legislative steps to permanently implement the name change.
Yet, since the creation and naming of executive departments is a congressional responsibility, any legal change would require approval from US Congress.
On Thursday, Hegseth signaled the change on social media by posting “Department of War” on his official X account.
DEPARTMENT OF WAR https://t.co/uyAZGiklRi
— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) September 4, 2025
Speaking to reporters at Fort Benning the same day, Hegseth further hinted that the name change was imminent. “I would say stand by tomorrow,” he said. “Words matter. Titles matter. Cultures matter. And George Washington founded the War Department. We’ll see.”
Trump and Hegseth have been implying the move in recent days.
Last week, in the Oval Office, the president also told reporters his administration intended to “change the name”.
“As the Department of War, we won everything. We won everything,” Trump said on 25 August, referring to the two World Wars. “We’re going to have to go back to that.”
Hegseth echoed the sentiment in a 3 September interview to Fox News. “We won World War I and we won World War II, not with the Department of Defence, but with a War Department, with the Department of War,” he said. “As the president has said, we’re not just defence, we’re offence.”
The Department of War was first established in 1789, the same year the U.S. Constitution came into effect, tasked with overseeing the nation’s Army and managing military affairs.
Congress established the agency to be led by a secretary of war. The bill was signed into law by President George Washington.
Following World War II, the department underwent a major reorganisation under President Harry Truman’s National Security Act of 1947. The Act merged the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy and the newly created Department of the Air Force into a single entity called the National Military Establishment.
In 1949, this organisation was renamed the Department of Defence.
The National Security Act also created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a senior military advisory body responsible for assisting the president in planning and directing military strategy.
The move to rename Pentagon is part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reshape the post-World War II national security framework and implement renaming initiatives across the military, with Hegseth playing a central role.
This has included cuts to the National Security Council and several Defence Department agencies. Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly raised the idea of renaming the department, including during a press conference at the June NATO summit in The Hague.
The last major military command renaming also occurred under Trump, when then-Defence Secretary Jim Mattis announced in 2018 that U.S. Pacific Command would be renamed U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
Hegseth has also pursued similar renaming efforts in other areas. He reversed a Biden-era decision that had removed Confederate-era names from bases such as Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, restoring the original names while officially dedicating them to different individuals with the same names. In June, he proposed renaming a Navy oiler ship that had been named after gay rights activist and Navy veteran Harvey Milk.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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