Round-up: Defense/War edition

Analysis of the week's events, in all their ridiculousness

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Department of War

It hasn’t happened yet as I’m writing this, but Trump will reportedly sign an executive order today renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

The U.S. had a Department of War from its founding until 1947, when the current Department of Defense was created. The story of why that happened is surprisingly boring.

Basically, prior to World War II the Department of War administered the Army while the Navy was under a separate Department of the Navy. The Army grew massively in size and influence during World War II and when the U.S. developed an Air Force during the conflict, that mostly did its own thing too.

The Department of War became a bit of an empty shell, and when the war was over, none of the three armed services liked the idea of losing all of their newfound power by being shoved back into it. So the War Department was disbanded and a new Department of Defense was created in which the three services would all share influence.

I don’t think Trump wants to go back to the era when the U.S. Army was so small that it barely merited its own independent bureaucracy, or when the Navy was under a completely different Cabinet secretary. As in most cases with Trump, this seems to be little more than meaningless theatrics.

Still, it could be expensive and time-consuming theatrics. If they’re really going to rebrand the agency and its whole global presence, that would probably cost billions. Why the hell spend that money on new signs and business cards when it could be spent on preparing for actual war?

And then there’s the issue of whether doing this is even legal. The name Department of Defense was created by an act of Congress, and giving the Pentagon a new one is something that Congress would have to do. Trump might claim to find some way around this with his executive order, but it will probably be legally dubious and lead to controversy - producing another pointless distraction.

Yet as I wrote about in Donald Trump, 9/11, and the Rise of Military MAGA, pointless symbolism is what a lot of the Trump regime’s approach to the Pentagon is really about. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is part of a post-9/11 generation of veterans who feel deeply uncomfortable with the U.S. military’s ambiguous performances in Iraq and Afghanistan and are desperately seeking for ways to reassert their (and their country’s) masculinity and martial pride.

And because they’re unserious people, they see this sort of stunt is the way to do it.

The Pentagon’s new mission

As the Trump regime has sent U.S. troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. - plus threatening to send them a bunch of other places, provided they have black mayors - I’ve been reflecting on what this means for the military as a whole.

Defense Secretaries and senior military leaders have traditionally spent their time preparing to fight and win wars against foreign adversaries. That involves investment, training, force planning, and a million other tasks - and it’s more than enough to keep the Pentagon humming with activity and hoping to avoid any other distractions.

Under the Trump regime, that doesn’t seem to be how things work. Senior leaders are instead spending their time making sure nobody accidentally gets shot while soldiers do traffic duty, pick up trash, and go after low-level street offenders. They’re also having to deal with the myriad legal issues that this use of the military brings up, as well as making sure it doesn’t spiral into a broader crisis in civil-military relations.

At a time when world peace might depend on the Pentagon not making any major screw-ups in the Asia-Pacific or Eastern Europe, this seems like a really bad use of time and resources. But the rumors in Washington are that when the regime releases the next iteration of the U.S. National Defense Strategy, this order of priorities will become official - policing the homeland will be given a higher billing than any overseas theater.

It’s an illusion to think that Americans are really safer if soldiers are spending their time fighting street crime and tackling drug runners. The U.S. has plenty of other agencies designed to do those things. It only has one military, and it ought to be left to do what it does best - for the sake of security as well as liberty.

Trump is the State. And the NSC. And the DoD. And…

I wrote back in May about how it looked like the Trump regime was in the process of dismantling the usual national security decision-making process. Well, here we are four months later, and it looks like the job is pretty much complete.