Comment by somenameforme
5 hours ago
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 from whatever - tyrant, terror, communism, burdens of oil, and so on. 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...
> It was always called the Department of War [1] from 1789 until 1947.
No, what became the Department of Defense didn't exist from 1789 until 1947. The cabinet level Department of the Navy (current Department of the Navy) and the cabinet-level Department of War (later split into the current Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force) did, as separate, co-equal entities with no single civilian head over them beneath the President.
The National Military Establishment under the cabinet-level Secretary of Defense was created as a unified military structure in 1947 over both the Department of the Navy (which remained a cabinet-level department) and what had been the Department of War (which was split into the cabinet-level Departments of the Army and the Air Force). And in 1949 the three service departments were fully subordinated within the NME instead of being cabinet level, and the NME was renamed the Department of Defense (pribably not entirely because it was really awkward having the combined military organization use an initialism that sounded like “enemy”, but...)
More detailed version in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825849
All you are describing is a restructuring of which the Department of War had gone through repeatedly throughout its history. It's not like it had the same structure, or anything remotely like it, in 1942 as in 1789. The choice of the name was, as you observe, a choice. And it coincides exactly with the move away from public honesty in international relations and events.
You have things like WW1 being framed (at the time) as 'The War to End All Wars' but I think that was probably naivete whereas after we started calling war 'defense' we entered into the era of 'police actions' instead of wars, like the Korean War, and outright false flags such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident for Vietnam. All the while the CIA was running around acting like a rabid chimp all across the world. It was entering into an era where deceiving the public became standard operating procedure, of which framing war as defense was but one typical aspect.
I believe we are now leaving that era, and I think that is a good thing for everybody.