Bring Back the War Department
5 min read
Donald Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth to lead the Defense Department signals the incoming administration’s intention to enact significant changes at the Pentagon. Some of what the administration aims to pursue seems ill-advised; waging a culture war inside the U.S. military is a specious enterprise, whether prosecuted by the left or the right. However, the Trump administration could swiftly enact one cultural change at the Pentagon that would be for the good, and send a powerful signal aligned with the administration’s priorities: Trump could ask Congress to redesignate the Defense Department as the War Department.
The secretary of defense position came into being after the Second World War, as part of the sweeping 1947 National Security Act. Before then, the nation had a War Department, which oversaw the Army, and a separate Navy Department. With the Cold War on the horizon, the 1947 act greatly expanded the scope of the national-security state to confront the Soviet threat; for example, the U.S. Air Force and CIA are both creations of the act. A 1949 amendment formally brought the armed forces under a single civilian leader, and renamed the new entity the Department of Defense. By changing the department’s name, Congress also endorsed an expansionist view of the new department’s mission. For the U.S. military, the 77 years that followed the act’s passage ushered in an era of unprecedented nation-building and humanitarian missions all over the world.
The Defense Department’s massive growth since 1947 enabled the type of interventionist foreign policy that Trump ran against. It has also come at the expense of other departments and agencies, such as the State Department and USAID. The agencies whose missions most closely align with the projection of nonmilitary power are perennially underresourced, and reduced to secondary roles. Too often, the face of U.S. diplomacy wears a uniform. During the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, an underresourced State Department relied on soldiers to perform civic tasks that the military was poorly equipped to handle. The result was two more post-1947 failed wars.
The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the First and Second World Wars were all fought and won by the War Department. Before 1947, when we had a War Department, Americans were able to boast that they had never lost a war. When the United States fought fewer major wars, its uninterrupted string of victories was a point of national pride. Since the creation of the Defense Department, the U.S. has never won a major war. Muddled outcomes such as those in Korea and Iraq are the closest thing it might claim to success.
A philosophy of defense has proved ineffective (if not disastrous) when compared with the more focused philosophy of war. Perhaps the War Department was less likely to fight wars, because its name made the department’s purpose more difficult to sugarcoat and obfuscate. A war department speaks in terms of victory and defeat. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt never spoke of exit strategies, nor did generals such as Ulysses S. Grant, John Pershing, and Dwight D. Eisenhower wring their hands about “boots on the ground.” If you want a clear strategy for winning wars, don’t play a semantic game with the name of the department that’s charged with the strategy’s execution. Call things what they are. The mandate of a war department is right there in its name.
Today, the power to wage war effectively resides in the executive branch of government. Gone is the era when Congress declared all of America’s wars, as the Constitution requires. This erosion of congressional war-making authority goes back at least 100 years, to World War I. When President Woodrow Wilson wanted the United States to intervene in Europe, one of his great impediments was that he could not prepare the Army to deploy without congressional authority. In 1916, to circumvent this restriction, he created the Marine Corps Reserve, which he could expand under executive authority. To this day, the Marine Corps boasts the motto “First to fight,” and although this motto has a certain martial élan, it primarily exists because the president used the Marines to get around Congress. This trend only accelerated in the second part of the 20th century. Most recently it has culminated with the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The congressional abdication of military authority has granted administrations of both parties the ability to wage extra-congressional wars during the first quarter of this century.
Nearly all of America’s extra-congressional wars have been wars of choice, when our adversaries haven’t posed any existential threat. The incoming Trump administration has correctly singled out China as our greatest national-security priority. And it’s an existential one. A war with China would in no way be limited. It would require a national mobilization unparalleled by any in our lifetime. It would call upon every resource the United States possessed. Victory would require a war fought with a merciless lethality, akin to the Second World War, a conflict our ancestors hoped to never see repeated, a war so bloody that it created an impulse to change the language we used around war.
In 1949, in addition to the name change, the Defense Department received a new crest, one derivative of the Great Seal of the United States. On the Great Seal, a bald eagle clutches a batch of arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right. The eagle faces the olive branch because the United States is a nation of peace. An oft repeated but erroneous myth is that during times of war, the seal changes so that the eagle faces the arrows. The myth does have its merits, though. When the eagle stares at the arrows, it understands the realities of war more clearly. Maybe we’ve been looking away for too long. Maybe if we were to turn our gaze again to the arrows, our nation would enjoy a little more peace. And maybe this small gesture would better prepare us to fight the next war.
