Comment by mcmcmc
11 hours ago
Unfortunately it’s not so shocking anymore. The Secretary of Defense texting imminent war plans to a journalist in a Signal group kinda jumped the shark.
11 hours ago
Unfortunately it’s not so shocking anymore. The Secretary of Defense texting imminent war plans to a journalist in a Signal group kinda jumped the shark.
Secretary of War
In law, it is still the Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense, no matter what cutesy nicknames the executive branch invents.
It was always called the Department of War [1] from 1789 until 1947. At that point it was repackaged as the Department of Defense when we started framing invading countries half-way around the world as 'defense'. Prior to that rhetoric around war was far more honest. We tried to buy a sizable chunk of Texas from Mexico. They rejected our offer so we invaded and took it, because we wanted it.
It's only in 1947 and later that somehow invading countries half-way around the world and shipping weapons to anybody with a buck began being framed as 'defense' or somehow saving the world for something or another. So in many ways I think it would be far more apt to say that 'Department of Defense' is the cutesy name. They're not defending anything - nukes and geography take care of that, more or less, on their own.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...
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