After hearing Palmer Luckey's argument for the name change[0], I tend to think it's good change.

Some of his arguments:

It used to be called the department of war, and it had a better track record with regard to foreign conflict, under that name then it did under the DoD name.

Department of war is a more honest name, department of defense is a somewhat newspeak term, although "Department of Peace" would be worse.

It's harder to seek funding for "war", then it is to seek funding for "defense". If you ask someone, "Do you want to spend money on education or war?", you will get a different answer asking, "Do you want to spend money on education or defense?".

[0] Palmer Luckey talking to Mike Rowe about the name change: https://youtu.be/dejWbn_-gUQ?t=1007

DoW is the opposite of newspeak, it is much more transparent and honest about what that organization is and has been for my entire life

I went to a military high school up until 2011 and never remember hearing it. My dad and grandpa were military for 20 years each and I've never heard either say it. It definitely hasn't been used broadly in the US for very long (maybe in very specific circles). Even my friends who work as engineers for defense contractors now have never called people "war fighters" around me.

> newspeak name for the DoD.

They changed the name and it matches the intention. It is not a newspeak name anymore.

Well, I’m in the US and have been following politics closely for the entire time window you mention, and this year marks the first time I’ve heard it. It is very jarring and a notable rhetorical shift from the concept of “service”.

20+ years would mean it started to be commonly used around the Iraq invasion, for context on “Orwellian”.

It's been in use by overly earnest DoD officials and Raytheon salespeople. But no normal person would use it unironically.

However I suppose Amodei in this context can be included in the former group.

Arguably the original name was the newspeak and the new name is more honest

Same.

Yeah, it’s common alright. Commonly used as a joke by every veteran I’ve ever met to mock try-hards.

I work in the defense industry. I have not heard a single person say Department of War or DoW.

We can use the word war because Iran used the word war. But it is not a War in the constitutional sense. Or something.

The president's club says that we are. Did the house vote for starting it?

we are though, they plotted to assassinate the US president, not to mention being the #1 sponsor of terrorism in the middle east, attacking our allies

What stops the DoW from going after me? As a Middle Easterner? And once it's done with me, why wouldn't it go after you? as its branches did, locally?

> Also the original commenter does not understand the word "Orwellian"

Seems they understood it well: George Orwell wrote a book named "1984", in which a central plot point was that distortion of language ("Newspeak") causes distortion of thought, which causes distortion of reality. Newspeak is a means of engineering reality.

This is an example of that: by distorting, say, "servicemember" into "warfighter", you distort the reality that people at the DoD are there to serve the people as their primary goal, not "fight wars". This means building bridges, levees, aiding disaster-struck friends overseas, etc.

Even if a war actually needs to be fought, it should not be the goal, and thus the job description. It should be in service of the actual primary goal, which is serving the people.