Pentagon asks Congress to enshrine the name “Department of War” in law: “It belongs in statute, not just in an executive order”

The Pentagon is calling on Congress to permanently enshrine the name “Department of War”. Sean Parnell, the chief spokesman and senior adviser to Secretary Pete Hegseth, asked lawmakers to keep in the final version of this year’s defence bill the provision restoring the name and to send it to President Donald Trump for signature. “The president acted. Now Congress must finish the job,” he wrote in an opinion piece in Fox News on Monday, October 26.

The renaming was done by a Trump executive order, which allowed use of the name. For Parnell that is not enough: “The name of the institution that sends Americans to fight belongs in statute, not just in an executive order.” As he notes, both the House of Representatives and the Senate Armed Services Committee have already backed restoring the name in this year’s defence bill.

The same day, the department’s official news service published a piece titled “What’s in a name”, in which Parnell argues that, a little over a year after the change, the new name sends a clearer message to allies and adversaries about the department’s mission. The department already operates under the new name, as seen when it recently designated the Confucius Institutes a national security threat and when Hegseth hosted Guyana’s president at the Pentagon.

The case from history

Parnell bases his argument on history. The Department of War was founded in 1789 under President George Washington and for more than 150 years led the American military in its most critical conflicts, from the Union victory in the Civil War to the Allied victory in the two world wars. The National Security Act of 1947 reorganised the armed forces and in 1949 the military establishment became the Department of Defense. “This is restoration, not invention,” he writes, quoting Washington’s phrase from his first annual message to Congress in 1790: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”

To critics who see the change as symbolic or unnecessary, he replies that “they have it backwards”, because words define the mission and the mission determines everything else. For allies, the mission is “to fight and win wars. Period.” “Clarity strengthens alliances. Ambiguity invites adversaries to test them,” he notes. A veteran of the 10th Mountain Division, he recalls that he led an infantry platoon in Barmal, Paktika province, Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan.

The spokesman admits that a name does not by itself make the military stronger. Every procurement decision, exercise and strategic investment, he writes, must answer whether it makes warfighters more capable of defeating every threat, from superintelligence and autonomous systems to advanced weapons and a revitalised defence industrial base. He also refers to the “Fortress America” initiative, which aims for military bases to operate autonomously, with their own energy sources, secure communications and critical stockpiles, even if civilian infrastructure collapses.

Parnell assures that the name changes nothing in the constitutional roles of Congress and the president, nor in the armed forces’ other missions such as disaster response and supporting allies. “We prepare for war so our adversaries never doubt the cost of starting one,” he concludes.