Trump hints Pentagon will be renamed Department of War

President Donald Trump on Monday foreshadowed that his administration, in coming days, will likely change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Politico writes.

Trump said officials would “probably” return the Pentagon to the more aggressive name it once held in about a week. Both he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who has vowed to restore the department’s “warrior ethos” — have repeatedly lamented the name change, which occurred after World War II.

“I don’t want to be defense only,” Trump said Monday in the Oval Office. “We want offense too.”

The War Department existed from 1789 until 1947, when the Truman administration split the department into the Army and the Air Force, and joined it with the then-independent Navy. Former President Harry Truman named the new cabinet-level agency the Defense Department.

Truman intended the name change to give the Pentagon chief more centralized powers over separate branches of the military, especially the Navy, which had significant independence through the end of World War II.

Trump has hinted in recent weeks about the possibility of reverting the name back, calling Hegseth his “Secretary of War” at a NATO summit in June and indicating that political correctness forced the switch.