I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).

I wanted to address this though:

> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.

The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.

But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.