U.S. President Donald Trump speaks after signing an government order, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth look on, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 25, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
President Donald Trump plans to signal an government order Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, his newest effort to challenge a picture of toughness for America’s navy.
The Republican president cannot formally change the title with out laws, which his administration would request from Congress. In the meantime, Trump will authorize the Pentagon to use “secondary titles” so the division can go by its authentic title.
The plans had been disclosed by a White House official, who requested anonymity forward of the public announcement, and detailed in a White House truth sheet.
The Department of War was created in 1789, the identical 12 months that the U.S. Constitution took impact. It was renamed by regulation in 1947, two years after the finish of World War II.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth posted “DEPARTMENT OF WAR” on social media after the government order was initially reported by Fox News.
Trump and Hegseth have lengthy talked about altering the title, and Hegseth even created a social media ballot on the subject in March.
Since then, he has hinted that his title as protection secretary might not be everlasting at a number of public occasions, together with a speech at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Thursday. He informed an auditorium full of troopers that it “may be a slightly different title tomorrow.”
In August, Trump informed reporters that “everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
When confronted with the risk that making the title change would require an act of Congress, Trump informed reporters that “we’re just going to do it.”
“I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that,” he added.
The transfer is simply the newest in an extended line of cultural adjustments Hegseth has made to the Pentagon since taking workplace at the starting of the 12 months.
Early in his tenure, Hegseth pushed onerous to remove what he noticed as the impacts of “woke culture” on the navy by not solely ridding the division of variety packages however scrubbing libraries and web sites of materials deemed to be divisive.
The end result was the removing and evaluate of a whole bunch of books in the navy academies, which ended up together with titles on the Holocaust and a Maya Angelou memoir. It additionally resulted in the removing off hundreds of web sites honoring contributions by ladies and minority teams.
“I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this — that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell informed reporters in March.
Hegseth has additionally presided over the removing of all transgender troops from the navy following an government order from Trump by way of a course of that some have described as “dehumanizing” or “open cruelty.”