Elliot Ackerman
Donald Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth to lead the Defense Department signals the incoming administration’s intention to enact significant changes at the Pentagon. Some of what the administration aims to pursue seems ill-advised; waging a culture war inside the U.S. military is a specious enterprise, whether prosecuted by the left or the right. However, the Trump administration could swiftly enact one cultural change at the Pentagon that would be for the good, and send a powerful signal aligned with the administration’s priorities: Trump could ask Congress to redesignate the Defense Department as the War Department.
The secretary of defense position came into being after the Second World War, as part of the sweeping 1947 National Security Act. Before then, the nation had a War Department, which oversaw the Army, and a separate Navy Department. With the Cold War on the horizon, the 1947 act greatly expanded the scope of the national-security state to confront the Soviet threat; for example, the U.S. Air Force and CIA are both creations of the act. A 1949 amendment formally brought the armed forces under a single civilian leader, and renamed the new entity the Department of Defense. By changing the department’s name, Congress also endorsed an expansionist view of the new department’s mission. For the U.S. military, the 77 years that followed the act’s passage ushered in an era of unprecedented nation-building and humanitarian missions all over the world.
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