By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN and CHRIS MEGERIAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, his latest effort to project an image of toughness for America’s military.
The Republican president can’t formally change the name without legislation, which his administration would request from Congress. In the meantime, Trump will authorize the Pentagon to use “secondary titles” so the department can go by its original name.
The plans were disclosed by a White House official, who requested anonymity ahead of the public announcement, and detailed in a White House fact sheet.
The Department of War was created in 1789, the same year that the U.S. Constitution took effect. It was renamed by law in 1947, two years after the end of World War II.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth posted “DEPARTMENT OF WAR” on social media after the executive order was initially reported by Fox News.
Trump and Hegseth have long talked about changing the name, and Hegseth even created a social media poll on the topic in March.
Since then, he has hinted that his title as defense secretary may not be permanent at multiple public events, including a speech at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Thursday. He told an auditorium full of soldiers that it “may be a slightly different title tomorrow.”
In August, Trump told reporters that “everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
When confronted with the possibility that making the name change would require an act of Congress, Trump told reporters that “we’re just going to do it.”
“I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that,” he added.
The move is just the latest in a long line of cultural changes Hegseth has made to the Pentagon since taking office at the beginning of the year.
Early in his tenure, Hegseth pushed hard to eliminate what he saw as the impacts of “woke culture” on the military by not only ridding the department of diversity programs but scrubbing libraries and websites of material deemed to be divisive.
The result was the removal and review of hundreds of books in the military academies, which ended up including titles on the Holocaust and a Maya Angelou memoir. It also resulted in the removal off thousands of websites honoring contributions by women and minority groups.
“I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this — that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters in March.
Hegseth has also presided over the removal of all transgender troops from the military following an executive order from Trump through a process that some have described as “dehumanizing” or “open cruelty.”
Originally Published: September 4, 2025 at 7:21 PM EDT
