'Department of War': The branding our soldiers deserve

President Trump’s decision to return the nation’s military to its 1789 factory settings as the "Department of War" sends a message with the subtlety of a monster truck rally — of deterrence to America’s enemies and resolve to America’s allies. 

But they are not its primary target.  

While the blast radius of Trump’s rebranding will reach Brussels and Beijing, the intended impact is much closer to home. 

The name "Department of War" serves as a resounding rebuke to policymakers, politicians and professors who seek to inject their intrusive thoughts of stylish strategies and social engineering onto America’s military.

For decades, these misguided groups have mistakenly seen the world as a diorama for experimentation, themselves as a Disney fairy godmother and the American military as social workers. 

Their take on war and peace is as contrived and cringeworthy as the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial, and it has yielded disasters from Somalia to Afghanistan. 

For Trump, a man who works in monikers the way Monet worked in oils, the rebranding is a torpedo to the engine room for these misguided efforts. Using the men and women of the United States military for anything other than to close with and kill the enemy is like using Picasso to paint a fence.

The Department of Defense name was adopted in 1949 — not coincidentally the same year the Soviets developed the atomic bomb. The anodyne appellation was intended so as not to provoke the paranoia of the Politburo. 

In the newly nuclear age, with military strategies struggling to catch up with apocalyptic weaponry, a less bellicose-sounding military establishment seemed to make sense in the service of preventing an atomic extinction event. 

However, it has been 80 years since Hiroshima, and the world’s superpowers have adapted to conflicts operating below the nuclear threshold. 

But it’s not just America’s adversaries, wonkish think tanks and eccentric academics who are being put on notice. There is an undeniable “the calls are coming from inside the house” dimension to the Pentagon’s problem. 

The leadership of America’s military who occupy the E-ring offices of the Pentagon have seemingly embraced faddish concepts removed from their core mission. 

As British military strategist B.H. Liddel Hart noted, “the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old idea out.” Trump’s rebranding is meant to be the crowbar to pry out these old ideas.

America’s generals have become more adept at code-switching between the salons of Georgetown, academic forums and Congressional testimony than at winning wars and preserving the warrior ethos of our service members.

It’s disturbing that the Joint Chiefs of Staff has seemingly paid more attention to social issues than to understanding how it is that the Taliban controlled more of Afghanistan after 20 years of American combat operations there (and spending over $2 trillion!) than they did when we entered the country after 9/11. 

Trump’s announcement also signals the type of men and women he is looking to promote into the ranks of America’s generals — roguish Runyonesque characters with a “break glass in case of emergency” quality. 

Today, true warfighters, like George S. Patton, Jr., with all their accompanying blemishes, would systematically weeded out by promotion boards prior to congressional confirmation. One former secretary of Defense described the Pentagon bureaucracy to a president-elect as “a glandular thing, a monstrosity.” He likened it to an empire too big for any emperor. That incoming president was John F. Kennedy and the former defense secretary was Robert Lovett, who had served under President Truman. 

The empire has only expanded since then. Today’s Defense Department is a bloated Botero, an aging, overindulgent Elvis with nuclear launch codes. 

In making his announcement, Trump cited the American military’s unblemished record of victories before the renaming of the War Department in the Truman administration. While our mixed record of military success since 1949 may be too heavy of an anvil to hang around the neck of a single seven-letter word, reinserting the word “war” in the name of America’s military institution serves as an important recurring reminder to adversaries, politicians and the Pentagon, of our military’s fundamental deadly purpose. 

Clausewitz titled his seminal work on conflict, “On War”— not “On Defense.” In short, the radiating effects of the name change to Department of War make it less likely that America will have to go to war and more likely that it will win when it inevitably does. 

Michael Keane is a fellow of the U.S. Department of War’s National Security Education Program. He is an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy where he teaches War and Diplomacy and the author of the “Dictionary of Modern Strategy & Tactics.”