Comment by dragonwriter
Comment by dragonwriter 3 days ago
In law, it is still the Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense, no matter what cutesy nicknames the executive branch invents.
Comment by dragonwriter 3 days ago
In law, it is still the Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense, no matter what cutesy nicknames the executive branch invents.
It was always called the Department of War [1] from 1789 until 1947. At that point it was repackaged as the Department of Defense when we started framing invading countries half-way around the world as 'defense'. Prior to that rhetoric around war was far more honest. We tried to buy a sizable chunk of Texas from Mexico. They rejected our offer so we invaded and took it, because we wanted it.
It's only in 1947 and later that somehow invading countries half-way around the world and shipping weapons to anybody with a buck began being framed as 'defense' or somehow saving the world from whatever - tyrant, terror, communism, burdens of oil, and so on. So in many ways I think it would be far more apt to say that 'Department of Defense' is the cutesy name. They're not defending anything - nukes and geography take care of that, more or less, on their own.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...
> It was always called the Department of War [1] from 1789 until 1947.
No, what became the Department of Defense didn't exist from 1789 until 1947. The cabinet level Department of the Navy (current Department of the Navy) and the cabinet-level Department of War (later split into the current Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force) did, as separate, co-equal entities with no single civilian head over them beneath the President.
The National Military Establishment under the cabinet-level Secretary of Defense was created as a unified military structure in 1947 over both the Department of the Navy (which remained a cabinet-level department) and what had been the Department of War (which was split into the cabinet-level Departments of the Army and the Air Force). And in 1949 the three service departments were fully subordinated within the NME instead of being cabinet level, and the NME was renamed the Department of Defense (pribably not entirely because it was really awkward having the combined military organization use an initialism that sounded like “enemy”, but...)
More detailed version in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825849
All you are describing is a restructuring of which the Department of War had gone through repeatedly throughout its history. It's not like it had the same structure, or anything remotely like it, in 1942 as in 1789. The choice of the name was, as you observe, a choice. And it coincides exactly with the move away from public honesty in international relations and events.
You have things like WW1 being framed (at the time) as 'The War to End All Wars' but I think that was probably naivete whereas after we started calling war 'defense' we entered into the era of 'police actions' instead of wars, like the Korean War, and outright false flags such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident for Vietnam. All the while the CIA was running around acting like a rabid chimp all across the world. It was entering into an era where deceiving the public became standard operating procedure, of which framing war as defense was but one typical aspect.
I believe we are now leaving that era, and I think that is a good thing for everybody.
> All you are describing is a restructuring of which the Department of War had gone through repeatedly throughout its history
No, from 1789 to 1947 there were two separate cabinet-level departments, War and Navy.
> It's not like it had the same structure, or anything remotely like it, in 1942 as in 1789
Internal to the two cabinet-level departments? Probably not.
At the cabinet level? There was exactly the same structure: the Department of War with the Army underneath it and the Department of the Navy with the Navy and Marine Corps.
The War Department did not become the Defense Department. In 1947 War was split into Army and Air Force, and a fourth cabinet secretary, the Secretary of Defense was added, heading the combined National Military Establishment that was created over both what had been the War Department and what still was the Navy Department (all still cabinet level departments). In 1949, the three service secretaries (two of which headed parts of what had been the War Department) were formally subordinated to the Secretary of Defense and the NME was renamed the Department of Defense. The Department of War was direct predecessor to the Departments of the Army and Air Force, not the Department of Defense, which was a new level of coordination interposed between the President and the formerly organizationally-separated services.
This is inaccurate. The Department of War initially had oversight over the Navy as well. The separation of the Navy into a separate department (which did not even exist at the time when the War Department was created) was one of those many restructurings it went through, without ever having a name change until we entered the era of deception.
There’s something in a dead reply that's a popular enough myth that its worth responding to:
> Something every single soldier and officer learns is that the entire department was previously called the Department of War. It was repackaged after WW2 as the Department of Defense when invading countries half-way around the world began being sold to the public as 'defense.'
This is a weirdly common belief, but it is not true. Up through WWII, the US had two cabinet level military departments, instead of the current one. Those two departments were the Department of War, under which was the Army, and fhe Department of the Navy, under which was the Navy and Marine Corps.
This was changed by two laws in the late 1940s. The first, the National Security Act of 1947, among other things:
* Split the Air Force and Army from each other, splitting the Department of War into two new cabinet-level Departments, the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force.
* Created an additional cabinet level Secretary of Defense to coordinate the combined military structure, which it called the National Military Establishment.
This was followed by the National Security Amendments Act of 1949, which:
* removed the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force from the Cabinet and formally subordinated them to the Secretary of Defense
* renamed the National Military Establishment (which was frequently referred to by the inconveniently-pronounced, for its role, initialism NME) the Department of Defense (which conbined with the preceding point is the source of the unusual departments-within-a-department structure of the DoD.)
The Department of War did once exist, but it was never a name for the same thing as the Department of Defense. It was one of two coequal entities that were subsumed by the National Military Establishment, the only reason it still doesn't exist as a subordinate entity within the NME, now DoD, like the Department of the Navy does is that it was split in two.