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President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday changing the Defense Department’s name to the Department of War as a “secondary” title.
The order authorizes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and DoD subordinate officials to use secondary titles such as “Department of War” and “Secretary of War” in public communications, and nonstatutory documents within the executive branch, according to a White House fact sheet.
“We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to DoD,” Trump said at an Oval Office press conference Friday announcing the move. “So, we’re going Department of War.”
Hegseth concurred with Trump’s contention.
“We changed the name after World War II from the Department of War to the Department of Defense and … we haven’t won a major war since,” he said.
“And that’s not to disparage our warfighters … That’s to recognize that this name change is not just about renaming, it’s about restoring; words matter,” Hegseth added.
Defense officials began the massive rebrand effort almost immediately.
By Friday afternoon, they had transformed their X account to the “Department of War” replete with a different seal for the avatar and redirected users on the internet from defense.gov to war.gov.
Changing the department seal at thousands of facilities worldwide figures to take considerably longer.
The order also instructed Hegseth to recommend actions — including executive and legislative actions — that would be required to permanently rename the department.
By law, only Congress can establish, shutter and rename federal departments. But some lawmakers are already moving to codify the new name.
“It is only fitting that we pay tribute to their eternal example and renowned commitment to lethality by restoring the name of the ‘Department of War’ to our Armed Forces,” Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., an Army veteran, said in a statement.
He introduced the Department of War Restoration Act on Friday.
Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced companion legislation in the Senate.
The proposal did take fire from the top Senate Republican overseeing Pentagon spending, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense.
The former Senate majority leader repeated his earlier criticism that the president’s fiscal 2026 defense request does not keep up with inflation.
“If we call it the Dept. of War, we’d better equip the military to actually prevent and win wars,” McConnell tweeted on X. “Can’t preserve American primacy if we’re unwilling to spend substantially more on our military than Carter or Biden. ‘Peace through strength’ requires investment, not just rebranding.”
Congress originally established the War Department on Aug. 7, 1789, the same year the Constitution took effect. It replaced the Board of War and Ordnance, which was created in 1776.
The War Department had oversight over the Army and Navy until 1798, when the Navy Department was formed.
The name remained for more than 150 years until it merged with the Department of the Navy and the newly established Department of the Air Force to become the National Military Establishment with the passage of the 1947 National Security Act.
In 1949, the NME was renamed the Department of Defense amid concerns that the acronym NME sounded like “enemy.”
—By John Goheen
