Nothing like a good old-fashioned rebrand to set the tone for what is in any case the most powerful fighting force in modern history. Per his 200th Executive Order of 2025, President Trump has declared that the Department of Defense must now be known as the Department of War , or at least as a secondary title as anything more would require an act of Congress; and that the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth , who has busied himself scourging the US military of what a fellow Republican Eric Schmitt described as “weakness and wokeness’, will now be Secretary of War.

The US has had a war department for much of its history. From 1789 until 1947, it oversaw the army and, from time to time, the navy too. That is until the advent of international law, multilateralism and a military doctrine based

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