The move would put Trump's stamp on the government's biggest organization.
www.reuters.com
U.S. President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday to rename the Department of Defense the "Department of War," a White House official said on Thursday.
The order would authorize Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department, and subordinate officials to use secondary titles such as "Secretary of War," "Department of War," and "Deputy Secretary of War" in official correspondence, public communications, according to a White House fact sheet.
The move, which would put Trump's stamp on the government's biggest organization
and likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, would instruct Hegseth to recommend legislative and executive actions required to make the renaming permanent....
The U.S. Department of Defense was called the War Department until 1949, when Congress consolidated the Army, Navy and Air Force in the wake of World War Two. The name was chosen in part to signal that in the nuclear age, the U.S. was focused on preventing wars, according to historians.
Changing the name again will be costly and require updating signs and letterheads used not only by officials at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., but also military installations around the world....
Department name changes are rare, and require congressional approval, but Trump's fellow Republicans hold slim majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives, and the party's congressional leaders have shown little appetite for opposing any of Trump's initiatives.,,,