It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.

Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.

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openasocket 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This is actually not true! This is a pedantic point but I think is important.

The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.

Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.

So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you that is how today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget

WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly become useless when surrounded by people who hate you. (Nuclear weapons sealed the equation.)

The Americans who fought in WWII saw that lesson firsthand and seem to have genuinely pivoted away from wars of conquest and annexation towards something closer to status quo preservation. We, of course, still went to war. But it was generally to help the current leader repel something or the other. The case in point for this is the truly devilish stuff having been shifted to the CIA's clandestine portfolio.

Renaming the DoD the DoW basically says all that clandestine stuff wasn't shameful, it's good. It's a real message being written by idiots who don't know history or war and are mastered by their own insecurities.

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SllX an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war. I don’t have a lot of patience for the romantic notions of men, that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself. Only how we actually prosecute our wars & handle the subsequent consequences of war will give them any meaning.

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JumpCrisscross 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war

Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?

> that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself

Department of War celebrates an era when wars of conquest were profitably fought. It explicitly embraces the notion that war is good and accretive to America. Renaming something the Department of War means we're going to have more wars. America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.

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SllX 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?

The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.

> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.

America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.

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JumpCrisscross 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

> morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”

It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position.

> America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war

Agree.

> Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”

We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.

I think we agree that renaming the DoW the DoD didn't reduce American military adventurism. What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.

	▲	SllX 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> If you claim all war is morally equal I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war. > We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars. Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense. > What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent. The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.

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edgyquant 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

World War 2 did not demonstrate that, the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents. What kind of narrative even is this?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries. And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests. Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators. Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.) People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.

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throw0101d 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.

The mission of the Department of War, which was its name pre-WW2, and the mission of the Department of Defence (post-WW2) is completely different: this is evidenced by the number of military personnel in the two time periods (and the draw-down in personal post-1990, after the Cold War ended):

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066986/us-armed-forces-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and...

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goatlover an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Big difference between defense of a country and starting wars. Canada and Switzerland don't start wars but they still have a military in case they ever need it to protect from an aggressor. Like Russia or the Canadian neighbor to the south who has a president making social media posts with the US flag over all of North America. Which suits the name, "Department of War".

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tastyface 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, except the administration changed the name and then immediately engaged in wars of blatant aggression with Venezuela and Iran.

What we choose to call things *is* important.

	▲	SllX 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You’re right, what we choose to call things is important, but our calls should better reflect reality. Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not. As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.