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Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.

by SllX 7d ago

charlesabarnes 7d ago
Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.
- shimman 7d ago
  Because the US has mostly been an imperial force of evil among the world, not a net benefit outsides of the elites that benefit from the deliberate colonialism + death. War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
- SllX 7d ago
  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.
  - throw0101d 7d ago
    > 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-military-personnel-capita-historical/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066986/us-armed-forces-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and_expenditures.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and...
  - JumpCrisscross 7d ago
    > 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.
    - SllX 6d ago
      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.
      - shagmin 6d ago
        Part of the point in the US having a huge military is to avoid war in the first place, it's a form of defensive posturing.
      - JumpCrisscross 6d ago
        > 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.
  - goatlover 6d ago
    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".
    - antonymoose 6d ago
      Both Bush and Obama used the Department of “Defense” to launch regime change “operations” across the MENA. If anything, Trump is guilty of saying the quiet part out loud, AKA “Truth in Advertising.” If anything, he got this one right. We’re a militant state.
  - tastyface 6d ago
    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 6d ago
      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”.
  - openasocket 6d ago
    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 today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
afavour 7d ago
If they have identical meanings then why’d they change it?
- SllX 7d ago
  I answered this in a sibling comment to yours.
  - afavour 6d ago
    I don’t think you did. You said the name makes no difference, I ask if that’s the case then why change it?
    - SllX 6d ago
      If this comment doesn’t adequately answer your question, please feel free to ask your follow-up questions either here or there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394 I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.
deleted 7d ago
[deleted]
throw0101d 7d ago
> Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is. No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College: > It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.” > These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies. > In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […] * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/defense-war-cringe-department/684112/ https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive... The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
- edgyquant 6d ago
  Defense was an Orwellian spin on the greatest warfighting organization in the history of the world. This quote does nothing to change anything but is some weird appeal to authority when no authority is needed
- tolerance 6d ago
  I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent. Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change. The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.

Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.

by SllX 7d ago

Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.

Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.

shimman 7d ago
Because the US has mostly been an imperial force of evil among the world, not a net benefit outsides of the elites that benefit from the deliberate colonialism + death. War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
SllX 7d ago
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.
- throw0101d 7d ago
  > 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-military-personnel-capita-historical/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066986/us-armed-forces-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and_expenditures.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and...
- JumpCrisscross 7d ago
  > 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.
  - SllX 6d ago
    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.
    - shagmin 6d ago
      Part of the point in the US having a huge military is to avoid war in the first place, it's a form of defensive posturing.
    - JumpCrisscross 6d ago
      > 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.
- goatlover 6d ago
  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".
  - antonymoose 6d ago
    Both Bush and Obama used the Department of “Defense” to launch regime change “operations” across the MENA. If anything, Trump is guilty of saying the quiet part out loud, AKA “Truth in Advertising.” If anything, he got this one right. We’re a militant state.
- tastyface 6d ago
  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 6d ago
    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”.
- openasocket 6d ago
  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 today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.

afavour 7d ago

If they have identical meanings then why’d they change it?

SllX 7d ago
I answered this in a sibling comment to yours.
- afavour 6d ago
  I don’t think you did. You said the name makes no difference, I ask if that’s the case then why change it?
  - SllX 6d ago
    If this comment doesn’t adequately answer your question, please feel free to ask your follow-up questions either here or there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394 I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.

deleted 7d ago

[deleted]

throw0101d 7d ago

> Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is. No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College: > It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.” > These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies. > In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […] * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/defense-war-cringe-department/684112/ https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive... The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.

edgyquant 6d ago
Defense was an Orwellian spin on the greatest warfighting organization in the history of the world. This quote does nothing to change anything but is some weird appeal to authority when no authority is needed
tolerance 6d ago
I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent. Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change. The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.