President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rename the Pentagon, previously known as the Department of Defense, the “War Department.” The White House chief of staff called the change necessary to better reflect the realities of the times.
“I think it’s a much more appropriate name, especially given where the world is today. We have the strongest military in the world,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office before signing the document, according to CNN.
According to an explanatory document obtained by the American network, the order authorizes the Secretary of Defense, the Department and subordinate officials to use the new secondary titles of “Secretary of War,” “Department of War” and “Deputy Secretary of War” in official communications, public correspondence, ceremonial contexts and non-constitutional documents within the executive branch. The implementation of these instructions began almost immediately.
After the order was signed, immediate changes were made at the Pentagon. Signs outside the office of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were replaced with the new title, while the official defense.gov website was redirected to war.gov, where the name “U.S. Department of War” appears at the top. The official acronym has also undergone a change: DOD (Department of Defense) has been replaced with DOW (Department of War) in some official documents and signatures.
Secretary Pete Hegseth, present during the signing ceremony, welcomed the initiative, emphasizing that “it’s not just about changing the name, but about restoring the purpose.” According to him, the U.S. military will go on the offensive, not just on defense, by “growing fighters and not just defenders.”
The executive order also requires all federal agencies and departments to adapt the new titles in their internal and external communications. Furthermore, it tasks Hegseth with proposing legislative and executive steps to officially change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
The document acknowledges that making the change permanent would require congressional approval, but Trump expressed doubts about whether that would be necessary. “I don’t know, but we’ll find out. I’m not sure they need it,” he said. The move marks the first time a U.S. president has taken such a step by executive order. The last time the department changed its name was in 1949, when President Harry Truman, through an act of Congress, transformed the former War Department into the Department of Defense as part of a broader reorganization of the U.S. military. The War Department was originally created by President George Washington at the dawn of the new U.S. military. The effort to revert the Pentagon to the “War Department” follows several other moves by Hegseth to restore names and symbols of the past. He has reversed a Biden administration decision to remove Confederate-era names from military bases like Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, restoring those designations, though he has officially justified them as dedications to other individuals with the same names. In June, Hegseth also ordered the name change of a supply ship named after LGBTQ rights activist and Navy veteran Harvey Milk.
