Of Course You Realize, This Means War

Trump wants to change the name of the Defense Department back to the War Department.

The Department of War, of course, is what the department overseeing the military was called when ot first came into being in 1789, when Henry Knox became its first secretary.  President John Adams created the Navy Department in 1798, and the two departments existed side by side for nearly 150 years.  Then in 1947, President Truman and Congress dismantled the War Department, which had overseen Army operations, by decoupling the Army, its Air Corps division, and the Marines from each other and creating separate departments for each branch, the former Army Air Corps becoming the United States Air Force.  They were then unified with the Navy Department under a single Department of Defense.  When, as a kid, I asked my father about the name, he explained to me that we didn't want to make war, we wanted to defend ourselves.

My father, of course, was also able to convince me that corporate sponsorship of public television was different from corporate sponsorship of commercial network television simply because there are no ad interruptions in public broadcasting.

Since 1947, though, we have made war frequently - in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq - and we haven't done a good job of defending ourselves, as 9/11 proved.  As much as I hate to admit it, Trump's proposed name change - something he says he can do without congressional approval - isn't as nutty as you might think.

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"I want to know how the War Department became the Defense Department." - George Carlin