President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth want to bring a major change to the Department of Defence.
Speaking with the press on Monday, August 25, alongside South Korean President Lee Myung-jae, Trump addressed a question about the use of military with police in Washington DC with a long speech about the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defence.
He shared that Hegseth had been "incredible with the, as I call it, the Department of War," which was the actual name of the department until 1947, prior to the creation of the modern American defence establishment.
Explaining why the previous name is superior, the president noted, "I think because, you know, Department of Defence, we won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War."
"And to me, that's really what it is. Its defence is a part of that. But I have a feeling we're going to be changing," Trump said.
Notably, the Department of War came into being only a few years after the end of World War II, when President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 in July of that year.
Initially the Department of War was renamed as the Department of the Army and was grouped with the Department of the Navy and the Department of the Air Force and was called the National Military Establishment, led by the first Secretary of Defence, James Forrestal.
Moreover, the law also created the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council but did not place those under Forrestal's control.
Two years later, Truman signed a law amending the National Security Act to combine the Navy, Army and Air Force departments into a renamed Department of Defence.
At the time, it was believed that the name change was because the abbreviation of National Military Establishment, N.M.E., was being pronounced as "enemy."
