Trump’s recent executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the “Department of War” has caused havoc inside the building in a way that nobody has seen before. Pentagon officials are reporting what one source said was “frustration, anger, and downright confusion” over a billion dollar re-branding mistake that nobody even asked for.
The launch was a total disaster. The Pentagon’s website crashed when they redirected defense.gov to war.gov. A random official squatted on the Department of War LinkedIn page because he was worried that foreign adversaries would grab it before he could. The Pentagon’s X account had the old DOD logo on its banner while it changed to a new “Department of War” avatar. It was like watching a government agency melt down publicly in real time.
But this is where things get really crazy. Republicans are also destroying this thing.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the leading Senate Republican overseeing Pentagon spending, completely blasted Trump on X: “If we’re going to call it the Dept. of War, it’d better actually put an equipped military in place to deter or win wars. Cannot maintain American primacy if we are unwilling to spend significantly more than either Carter or Biden on our military.”
This is not an endorsement from inside your own Party.
The mathematics are insane. Pentagon employees will have to change seals on more than 700,000 facilities around the world. Every uniform, letterhead, and a piece of signage needs to change from Alaska to Afghanistan. A Pentagon official even joked they’d probably change cafeteria napkins! Cost estimates are in the billions while military readiness takes a backseat to… rebranding.
Democrats are quick to note the irony. Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize while renaming the Pentagon after war. Senator Jeanne Shaheen called it “a very dangerous atmosphere” and accused the administration of creating diversions “from what we need to be focusing on in terms of implementing the readiness of our troops.”
The Pentagon has not seen this level of internal resistance in years. Career officials who typically stay silent are voicing their concerns over the effort to do so. It took three weeks just to rewrite language associated with diversity from websites after Trump’s earlier order and officials are loathe to even think about the “longer-term headache” that will ensue from this rebranding.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing his “warfighter ethos” agenda, which he claims will “set the tone for the country.” But those at the Pentagon are skeptical. They see billions of dollars wasted on “glamour projects” while pretty basic military needs are unmet.
The historical background is even more salient. The Prelude to the Department of Defence – the Department of War – didn’t precede Truman introducing the Pentagon framework post-World War II – until 1947 itself. Essentially, we are regressing 80 years, for what purpose?
Maybe Trump thinks “offense“ sounds better than “defense“. Though my guess is that Pentagon officials who are managing this bureaucratic catastrophe likely have a different definition of what sounds good right now.
