President Donald Trump’s Sept. 5 executive order authorizing the Defense Department to “be known as” the War Department until he can cajole Congress into changing the name officially is more than just a manifestation of Trump’s affinity for the good old days. It’s a rebranding effort designed to project a more muscular version of U.S. military might — Trump’s vision of “peace through strength.”
Notwithstanding two U.S. victories in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, the NATO war in Yugoslavia in 1999, successful military operations in Haiti (1994), Panama (1989), and Grenada (1983), not to mention the defeat of the Islamic State group in 2016, for which he took full credit, Trump is of the opinion that the U.S. armed forces have not won anything since the War Department was renamed in a massive postwar reorganization of the U.S. military establishment in 1947.
“So we won the First World War, we won the Second World War, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense,” Trump said when signing the order in the Oval Office.
“It has to do with winning,” he said. “We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct or wokey, and we just fight forever. … We wouldn’t lose, really, we just fight for sort of tie.”
Newly designated War Secretary Pete Hegseth was quick to start singing from Trump’s hymnal. “We changed the name after World War II from the Department of War to the Department of Defense in 1947. And as you pointed out, Mr. President, we haven’t won a major war since.”
Hegseth, who won Trump’s confidence job with his pledges to change the culture of the military by rooting out wokeness and diversity initiatives while restoring what he called a “warrior ethos” with an emphasis on “lethality,” was locked and loaded with an arsenal of bumper sticker slogans to sell the new, old name.
“The War Department is going to fight decisively, not endless conflicts,” he enthused. “It’s going to fight to win, not to lose. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.”
The bellicose bluster is a curious marketing strategy for a president who said in his inaugural address that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” and who is campaigning openly for a Nobel Peace Prize, claiming to have personally “solved seven wars” since taking office.
In one of his first actions to shrink the size of government, Trump, via executive order, closed the Institute of Peace, an independent, nonprofit, donor-supported organization — firing its 300 employees and seizing its majestic headquarters building across the street from the State Department. Trump hates wars, he tells us, especially long, drawn-out conflicts such as the one in Ukraine, where thousands of soldiers and hundreds of civilians die each month it drags on.
“We get satellite pictures of the war field. … It’s terrible — bodies, arms, heads, legs all over the place,” he has recounted many times. “They’re human lives, and I want to see it stopped.”
Trump, who boasted during the 2024 campaign that “I had no wars” during his first term, has shown a thirst for short, winnable wars, especially ones where the odds are stacked in favor of the United States. Barely two months into his second term, he started one.
“Operation Rough Rider” was a U.S. shooting war against Houthi rebels in Yemen with the stated aim of restoring freedom of navigation to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden maritime shipping lanes.
The campaign was designed to last 90 days, but after costs ballooned to around $2 billion and seven Reaper drones and two U.S. F-18 fighter jets were lost, including one that went overboard when a U.S. aircraft carrier was forced to conduct evasive maneuvers, Trump lost interest and sought an exit ramp, making a deal with the Houthis to stop shooting at each other, but not at other nations’ ships.
Despite the Pentagon declaring “total victory,” freedom of navigation was not restored, the Houthis lived to fight another day, and now Israel is the one doing the bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen.
Then came the “perfect” war against Iran, or the “12-day war” as Trump dubbed it.
America’s part took only a day and a half, and Trump approved it only after Israel did the heavy lifting, eliminating all of Iran’s air defenses so U.S. B-2 stealth bombers could deliver their massive bunker-buster bombs at minimal risk.
“It was perfect,” Trump gushed. “It was actually flawless. They flew for 37 hours back and forth, and there wasn’t a bolt that was out of condition, there wasn’t an engine failure, there was no problem. It was a perfect attack, and it knocked out any possible nuclear capability for Iran.”
Flush from that victory, Trump is once again spoiling for a fight.
Now his target is drug smuggling, typically the purview of the Coast Guard, which, unlike the active-duty military, has law enforcement authorities on the high seas.
The U.S. has amassed a small naval armada off the coast of Venezuela, deployed a squadron of F-35s to Puerto Rico, and, as an opening salvo, destroyed a speedboat in international waters alleged to be laden with drugs and carrying 11 “narcoterrorists” from the Tren de Aragua cartel, supposedly with the ultimate destination of the U.S.
“When I see boats coming in loaded up the other day with all sorts of drugs, probably fentanyl mostly, but all sorts of drugs, we’re going to take them out,” Trump said. “We’re going to save a lot of people … 350,000 people died last year from drugs, and we’re not going to let that happen to this country.”
Administration officials say the unprecedented drone strike on unidentified civilians suspected of drug smuggling is part of Trump’s “America First” policy to make protecting the homeland the top priority of the U.S. military, whether it’s eliminating drug cartels, sealing the border, or helping reduce crime in big cities.
The retrenchment from foreign commitments is outlined in a draft National Defense Strategy document, reportedly written by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, which puts domestic and regional missions above countering China and Russia.
Democrats are already pushing back against Trump’s expansive use of the military to do what typically has been done by law enforcement, and even the renaming of the DOD.
“Congress would have to change the official title of the Department of Defense,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “In Title 10 of the U.S. Code, it is the Department of Defense. That’s the law.”
Earlier this month, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Trump and Hegseth violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law, when National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles.
“There was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law. Nevertheless, at defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws,” wrote Judge Charles Breyer, who said plans to deploy troops to other cities would amount to “creating a national police force with the president as its chief.”
Reed says, and many legal experts agree, that Trump’s order to fire on the suspected drug boat based on intelligence, but with no evidence of imminent threat, may well also be a violation of the law.
“The boat was unarmed,” Reed said. “It was a civilian craft. It was in international waters. The rule of law and the operating principles of our navy and our military is if there’s a civilian boat that’s suspected of anything, particularly in international waters, you have to make an attempt to stop the boat. And it really conflicts with not only the law of war, but also our constitutional requirements for Congress to authorize these types of military actions, not the administration.”
Hegseth made a one-day trip to Puerto Rico to give a pep talk to U.S. troops who he said were on the front lines of Trump’s new war on Venezuelan drug cartels.
“Make no mistake about it, what you’re doing right now is not training,” Hegseth told the sailors and Marines aboard the USS Iwo Jima. “This is the real-world exercise on behalf of the vital national interest of the United States of America to end the poisoning of the American people. You’re trained. You’re prepared. You’re ready, and you’re lethal, and the American people are counting on you. … Narcoterrorists and drug traffickers are on notice.”
“The power to declare war is constitutionally vested in the United States Congress, not the president of the United States,” Reed said. “You know, [Trump] cannot invent enemies and then conduct unilateral military campaigns across the globe against them. If this is an ‘all-out war’ — and they love the term war — then the United States Congress has to step in and authorize it.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on national security.
