Rebranding the Defense Department Will Do Trump More Harm Than Good
President Donald Trump caused a stir this week with his announcement that he would change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. The rebranding will not change the official name of the organization, which would require action by Congress. But it will require the expenditure of money and labor to change the wording on letterheads, monuments and anything featuring the Defense Department’s name on installations domestically and worldwide. The estimated cost, which will come to hundreds of millions of dollars, is already vexing Pentagon officials who prefer to focus on genuine threats to U.S. security.
Aside from what appears to be a consequential and arguably distracting use of tax dollars and labor, the move’s messaging is problematic and puzzling from the perspective of several international relations traditions. From a realist perspective, one of the defining challenges for states is the so-called security dilemma: how to maintain their own security without alarming their neighbors into taking actions that undermine that very security. In fact, when the original War Department was reorganized and renamed the Department of Defense in 1947, it was an effort to soften the reality of the United States’ postwar primacy by signaling that Washington would use its power for the defense not only of its own interests but also the collective social good. Trump’s reversal of that rebranding will, according to some, inflame security dilemmas, rattle U.S. allies and hand its adversaries rhetorical tools for their own purposes.
From an institutionalist perspective focused on regulative rules, the new brand is also a dangerous repudiation of long-standing norms underpinning the postwar order. Trump’s insistence on associating the U.S. with the projection of offensive force clashes with the U.N. Charter, which forbids all but defensive wars. Indeed, as David Sanger points out, it obfuscates some of the greatest foreign policy achievements of U.S. hegemony and global postwar history: the dramatic declinein interstate wars, the decline in legitimacy of territorial conquest and, most importantly, the absence of any great power wars since the advent of the U.N. system.
Aside from IR theory, the choice to expend resources and political capital on a name change most observers consider meaningless has important implications for U.S. foreign policy and, perhaps more importantly, civil-military relations. That’s because it both dramatically narrows andunhelpfully broadens the perceived purpose and operational latitude of the U.S. military. Each of these, in different ways, may complicate the military’s sense of mission, purpose and mandate, as well as the kinds of legal exposure troops and civilian defense policymakers may face under international law.
Trump’s rebrand narrows the military’s role in America and the world because for most of the past 80 years, fighting wars per se has been a central but not a defining role for the country’s armed forces. Nor is it the main thing the U.S. military understands it should be prepared to do, according to the most recent National Security Strategy published in 2022.
Several decades of U.S. military doctrine have emphasized that the key threats to the U.S. homeland now come not from external invasion but from non-kinetic sources, such as cyberattack, state failure and especially—as a report released just before Trump’s return to office underscored—climate change. Narrowing the military’s role from “defense” to “war” not only signals to U.S. allies and adversaries Washington’s intention to adopt a more aggressive role in the world, but also hamstrings the U.S. military’s ability to focus on defending against and working to prevent other threats besides invasion from abroad. For Trump and the more isolationist wing of the Republican party, this may be just what’s needed. But it also undermines the military’s proactive approach to more comprehensive threat assessment and response, as well as its role in conflict prevention and mitigation worldwide. As some observers have noted, this actually weakens the military while making America look weak as well.
Trump seems to be field-testing the idea of “war” as a catch-all rationale for the use of lethal force, regardless of the existence of an actual armed conflict.
Second, this is a peculiar move for Trump at a moment when he is actually repurposing the U.S. military for non-warfighting operations, such as domestic law enforcement (which in practice has meant members of the National Guard cleaning up trash in the streets of Washington). This use of the military has drawn criticism from Trump’s opponents on legal grounds, as well as from national security experts worried that turning the military inward will reduce its effectiveness in genuine foreign policy crises. But it has also caused a morale crisis in the military itself, with a significant number of servicemembers questioning what they are being used for. Emphasizing the role of the military in fighting wars—which is generally understood as wars abroad, not domestic policing—puts this disconnect into even sharper relief.
Of course, it is reasonable to think that Trump’s strategic logic is to exploit that very cognitive dissonance to turn nearly everything and anything into a “war,” in order to justify the use of the U.S. military at will, including at home. Already, in the first six months of his second term, he has characterized drug smuggling by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as an “armed attack” justifying mass deportations. And it is likely no coincidence that on the same week that he announced the Defense Department’s name change, he ordered the U.S. military to destroy a civilian vessel merely alleged to be trafficking drugs under the guise of a “war” against cartels. The Trump administration seems to be field-testing the idea of “war” as a catch-all rationale for the use of lethal force against people, regardless of the existence of an actual armed conflict or international legal standards.
But if so, the strategy is backfiring. Experts have pointed out that bombing the boat was an illegal act with no justification under existing statutes. Even the staunchest proponents of the contested “targeted killings” of high-level al-Qaida operatives with drone strikes during the 2010s see major red flags regarding the random use of force by the U.S. Navy against civilian boats not engaged in armed attack, crewed at worst by people merely suspected of a non-capital crime, on the high seas where no state has jurisdiction to mete out the death penalty without due process. Senior Pentagon officials themselves have reportedly criticized the operation as patently unlawful.
Paradoxically, framing these other operations as acts of “war” where no war exists actually puts the U.S. and U.S. servicemembers at more legal risk under international law than if Trump characterized these kinds of actions as “operations other than war,” as previous administrations have done. War is outlawed by international treaty except in cases of genuine self-defense against an armed attack or with the blessing of the U.N. Security Council. Moreover, even in a bona-fide war of self-defense, the laws of armed conflict—including distinctions between civilians and combatants that the U.S. military has historically taken seriously—would apply. By contrast, low-intensity operations characterized as defense but not war once created legal cover for some operations, allowing troops to move in a gray area with plausible deniability. If everything the Defense Department does is war, then war law would apply everywhere.
A more disturbing implication is that this new language is not intended for a foreign policy audience at all, but to frighten what Trump views as his domestic enemies. But there as well, the war framing has appeared to backfire. On Saturday, Trump posted a meme on social media portraying himself as the napalm-loving Col. Kilgore from “Apocalypse Now,” with the Chicago skyline on fire in the background and a message reading, “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” But by Monday, the intense reaction forced him to backpedal, saying at a press briefing, “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities … This isn’t a war, it’s common sense.”
So, what if anything doesTrump gain, or imagine he gains, from the rebrand? One explanation is that it is a continuation of the political theater he is known for. Trump may be using language to project strength domestically by peacocking internationally in the manner of other authoritarian states. International relations scholars have noted the link between this kind of militaristic leadership style and certain notions of alpha masculinity with which major powers compete for prestige. For a certain audience of domestic supporters, this move creates spectacle, communicates bombast and entertains in the style of an action film, even as it monopolizes media and civic attention and paralyzes the opposition by “flooding the zone.”
Second, for those troops who must grudgingly carry out the executive order and the taxpayers who must finance it, the seeming insignificance may be part of the point. The name change is a largely empty and wasteful gesture, but because it harms no one, it cannot be meaningfully opposed. And once implemented, it will further acclimate the military and the U.S. public to accommodating Trump’s will on even the most arbitrary of matters.
Even for those who don’t object to the messaging on ethical grounds, however, it is questionable whether these putative gains for Trump outweigh the domestic and foreign policy costs of the rebrand. Nor does the move appear to have muted criticism of the boat bombing, which has been decried by numerous lawyers and even a prominent Republican senator. Meanwhile a coalition of veteran, human rights and faith-based groups is loudly opposing the overall push for a “war” on drug cartels in Latin America. Ultimately, the negative fallout from this show of militarism may help those who oppose Trump’s agenda, both among civilians and within the military, more than it helps Trump himself.
Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter.