In US statecraft and warcraft, the president and Pete Hegseth are now saying previously quiet parts out loud
By Norman Solomon / The Guardian
The Department of Defense will soon officially become the Department of War, if Republicans get their way. Key committees in the House and Senate have approved the name change, and Donald Trump is eager to sign it into law. The rebranding is candid and ominous, offering a future of heightened zeal for killing, maiming and destroying.
Christened in 1949, the Department of Defense unified the military branches with the Pentagon as their headquarters. Since then, presidents have routinely promoted each new war as vital for the defense of the United States and its values, a pretense that has pervaded mainstream media and political discourse.
Belief in that pretense has now hit bottom, with US public support for this year’s war on Iran extraordinarily low from the outset. But Trump, defense secretary Pete Hegseth and their underlings are doing what they can to inculcate the idea that US warfare is not just superbly laudable but also inevitable. The unabashed fervor for catastrophic violence is fueling the momentum to replace “defense” with “war” department.
A switch to Department of War would undermine some of the deceptive marketing that has been central to the Department of Defense brand. Along the way, the new name could make it more difficult to perpetuate the assumption that US military actions spring from admirable motives.
Politicians and journalists drag the public down a misleading rabbit hole when they habitually refer to “defense spending” and a “defense budget”. Even antiwar activists do the same as they advocate for cutting the “defense” budget and thus – given the positive connotations of the word – undercut their position from the outset.
Of course, we can’t blame the sloppy and manipulative uses of the word “defense” for the illusions that drive public support for US foreign policy. But as George Orwell pointed out: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
The plan to go with the Department of War is a symptom of what Martin Luther King Jr called “the madness of militarism”. Over time, the name change would further normalize such madness.
The Department of Defense has always functioned as the ultimate blunt instrument of a warfare state bent on leading the global arms race while frequently engaging in wars of aggression. Euphemisms like “defense”, in tandem with lofty rhetoric about seeking peace or spreading democracy, never spared anyone from the lethality of Pentagon firepower.
Boilerplate claims of peaceful intent have been automatic. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on 10 August 1964, greenlighting escalation of the Vietnam war that was to take an estimated 3.8 million lives, he declared: “Our one desire – our one determination – is that the people of south-east Asia be left in peace to work out their own destinies in their own way.”