The Virtue—and Danger—of Calling War by Its Name

RadicalLeft.site views the proposed renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War with ambivalence. On one level, the new name has the considerable virtue of honesty. The institution housed in the Pentagon is not principally engaged in defending American territory from invasion. It maintains military installations throughout the world, operates fleets and aircraft thousands of miles from American shores, supplies weapons to foreign governments, conducts military operations in distant countries, and continuously prepares for future conflicts. Whatever defensive purposes some of these activities may serve, the department is, unmistakably, an enterprise devoted to preparing for and conducting war. Calling it the Department of War therefore strips away a euphemism. It tells the public, foreign governments, military personnel, and policymakers what the institution actually does.

Truth in governmental language is no small virtue. Words can conceal responsibility. They can transform invasions into “interventions,” civilian deaths into “collateral damage,” torture into “enhanced interrogation,” and war itself into a series of antiseptic “operations.” A government that uses honest language at least makes it more difficult for citizens to misunderstand—or pretend to misunderstand—what is being done in their name.

From that perspective, “Department of War” is a refreshing acknowledgment of reality. It reminds us that military power is not merely an abstraction called “defense.” It consists of weapons designed to destroy, organizations trained to kill, and policies that can leave human beings dead, maimed, displaced, or bereaved. Those realities may sometimes be justified. They should never be disguised.

But the former name carried meaning of another kind. “Department of Defense” was not merely descriptive; it was aspirational. It asserted that American military power was to be exercised defensively: to protect the country, preserve peace, safeguard allies, and resist aggression. The name did not guarantee that the government would live up to those ideals. History provides abundant evidence that it often did not. Nevertheless, the title announced a standard against which the department’s conduct could be judged.

That standard had value precisely because it was so frequently violated. When the government initiated a questionable war, intervened in another nation’s affairs, or used military force without genuine necessity, critics could point to the department’s professed defensive mission. The name supplied a moral vocabulary with which to expose the contradiction between the institution’s declared purpose and its actual conduct.

Hypocrisy is rightly condemned, but hypocrisy also has an indirect virtue: it pays tribute to the principle being violated. A government that feels compelled to describe its wars as defensive tacitly acknowledges that aggression is disreputable. It accepts, at least rhetorically, that force requires justification and that war should be regarded as an exceptional measure rather than an ordinary instrument of national policy.

The name “Department of War” may weaken that inhibition. It does not merely acknowledge that the department possesses the capacity to wage war. It risks presenting war as the department’s natural occupation and perhaps even its institutional purpose. The name may encourage a culture in which belligerence is admired, restraint is mistaken for weakness, diplomacy is treated as an impediment, and the ability to destroy becomes a principal measure of national greatness.

Names do not mechanically determine conduct. The Department of Defense fought many wars, just as a Department of War might sometimes preserve peace. But names influence expectations. They help establish the ideals an institution believes it must publicly honor. An agency called the Department of Defense can at least be asked to explain how its actions defend. An agency called the Department of War need explain only how effectively it wages war.

Therein lies radicalLeft’s ambivalence. The new title may describe the institution more candidly than the old one did. Yet the old title preserved an aspiration—however imperfectly honored—that American military power should be restrained, justified, and directed toward protection rather than conquest.

Truth is a virtue. But abandoning a noble pretense is not necessarily progress when the pretense represented a standard that government could be called upon to meet. The preferable solution would not be to restore dishonest language while continuing the same conduct. It would be to create a Department of Defense that genuinely deserved its name.