Rash: ‘Department of War’ sends the wrong signal

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“We think words and names and titles matter,” Pete Hegseth recently told Fox News when discussing President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

They sure do.

For relatively mundane matters, like Trump now referring to the Forest Lake native as secretary of war, not secretary of defense.

But more profoundly, as a signal to adversaries and allies alike, let alone U.S. citizens, on what the administration values.

“When I survey the threats we confront as Americans, changing the name of the Department of Defense is not something I would put on my top-10 list of priorities for the Pentagon — not even close,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“We are confronting an axis of aggressors consisting of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea,” Bowman said. “They’re unified by their antipathy for Americans, our allies, our interests and our democratic principles. Their cooperation is making each of them more formidable, reducing the margin of safety of Americans.”

Cooperation used to be a decisive U.S. advantage. NATO nations banded together to prevail over an isolated Soviet Union in the Cold War and then rallied around the U.S. after 9/11 — 24 years ago last week.

More recently, Asian-Pacific pacts, including the so-called Quad (the U.S., Australia, Japan and India) have been formed to counter challenges from China. But last week, in a pique over the diplomatic drift with Washington, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi figuratively (and even literally) held hands with despots America’s desperately trying to contain.

The linguistic shift from “Defense” to “War” risks repelling allies even more than adversaries.

At a minimum, it is “a very interesting performance art on the part of the administration,” said Jon Olson, a retired commander who spent 21 years in U.S. naval intelligence who now teaches at Carleton College and the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School.

But now, Olson said, our commitment is in doubt. “When we had the Department of Defense we worked collaboratively with our allies and friends around the world. And now we have the Department of War, and we’re abandoning all of those friends and allies.”

Today’s turbulent world “is real-world war and peace, life-and-death stuff,” said Bowman. “Our adversaries understand the value of partners [being] more formidable because of their cooperation.”

Every country will react differently to the more bellicose branding. Europe in particular, Bowman suspects, “might just see this as more evidence of what is a unique moment in Washington.”

Bowman was speaking figuratively, but the nation’s capital is literally having a unique moment with Trump’s deployment of the National Guard. Memphis is next, and then maybe Chicago — a possibility the president posted (and boasted) about on social media via a meme poster of “Apocalypse Now.”

Retitled “Chipocalypse Now,” the faux poster, replete with military imagery, features his face on Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore character. The social-media post came with these comments from the commander in chief: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” (changing the original, legendary line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”) and “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

More caution seems warranted on another recent extraordinary — and perhaps extralegal — use of the military: the sinking of a Venezuelan vessel allegedly carrying gang members ferrying drugs. Normally, the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard would board the boat in a law-enforcement action. Instead, all 11 on board were killed in a military strike — even though, according to recent reporting by the New York Times, the boat may have already turned around. (On Monday, Trump announced a second strike, which killed three people, against a Venezuelan craft he said was carrying drugs.)

“That’s another fundamental change in what the U.S. has always stood for,” said Olson. “As the leader of the free world, we care about law and order and making sure that people’s rights are afforded to them. We don’t just go kill people.”

Hegseth’s statement on words mattering was in response to renaming his department, which seems to be just the latest change spurred in the service of conservatism.

Referring to broader political dynamics and important American norms, mores and institutions, Bowman said:

“The essential conservative impulse is an appreciation for the fact that it is easier to destroy than build. So before you destroy an institution you better think twice because you’re probably standing on decades, or more likely centuries, of informal and formal institution building, and you won’t appreciate how good you had it until that institution is gone.