Comment by dragonwriter

> It used to be named the Department of War

No, it didn't.

For a few years before it was the Department of Defense it was the National Military Establishment (with an initialism with a very unfortunate pronunciation given its function) and before that it didn't exist at all.

Now, before the National Military Establishment was formed to unify the nations military bureaucracy, there were two separate cabinet level departments, the Department of War (which oversaw the Army) and the Department of the Navy (which oversaw the Navy, including the Marine Corps.) When the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and the Air Force, and the Department of War was likewise split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force. Both of these new Departments and the Department of the Navy remained (briefly) cabinet-level departments with their own Secretaries, while the NME was headed by the new Secretary of Defense.

Very quickly, though, further reforms were adopted in law and the NME became the Department of Defense and the service secretaries were formally subordinated to the Secretary of Defense and were now subcabinet positions (which is how the DoD got its unique, within the US executive branch, Department with its own cabinet level Secretary with subordinate Departments headed by a subcabinet level Secretaries organization.)

TLDR: The Department of War was not an earlier name for the Department of Defense, it was the name for the Department of the Army before the Air Force was split out from it.

> Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did.

Well, again, it couldn’t be named back to “Department of War”, because its only previous name was “National Military Establishment.” And while some people obviously agreed that it should be called “Department of War”, they didn’t actually rename it. The name in law of the organization named “The Department of Defense” in 1949 by amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 remains “The Department of Defense”. It hasn’t been renamed. The present executive branch leadership has adopted nicknames for the department and the titles of its officials ("secondary titles” in the language of EO 14347 which formalized the system of nicknames [and also recounts as if true the false history that “Department of War” was previously the name of the Department of Defense].)