4 hours ago
4
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
When President Harry S. Truman signed the law creating the Defense Department from the remnants of the War Department in August 1949, Joseph Stalin was 16 days from proving the Soviets could detonate a nuclear weapon, and Mao Zedong was less than two months from declaring the creation of the People’s Republic of China.
It was a terrifying time for Americans, and the new name was intended to reflect an era in which deterrence was critical — because war, if it broke out among the superpowers, could be planet-ending. For decades, the odds of avoiding that nuclear exchange, or direct superpower conflict, seemed slim at best. So to many historians, the greatest accomplishment of the Cold War is that it largely stayed cold, despite wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and arms races that followed.
All of which makes President Trump’s planned executive order on Friday seeking to restore the Pentagon to its old name — the War Department — more than just a throwback, a restoration of tough-guy nomenclature. At a moment when deterrence is more critical than ever — in cyberspace, outer space and a world where Russia and China are celebrating an uneasy partnership to challenge American pre-eminence — Mr. Trump argues that the answer is to go back to the good old days.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War,” he told reporters two weeks ago. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
To anyone who has watched the revolution sweeping the country’s national security institutions over the past seven months, the president’s order came as no surprise.
“In a way it makes perfect sense: This administration is simply taking us back to that period before the Truman era,” said Douglas Lute, a career Army officer who played key roles in the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations and served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO. “It has disassembled the processes, institutions and the norms that were established after World War II.
