US President Donald Trump is directing that the Pentagon be known as the Department of War.<\/p>\n
He will sign an executive order on Friday for the Department of Defense to use the new name as a secondary title and for Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to be known as Secretary of War.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon – which oversees the US armed services – is the successor to the War Department, which was first established as a cabinet-level agency in 1789 and existed until 1947.<\/p>\n
The responsibility of creating executive departments rests with the US Congress, meaning that an amendment would be required to legally change the department’s name.<\/p>\n
The BBC has seen the text of the executive order, which says: “The name ‘Department of War’ conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve compared to ‘Department of Defense,’ which emphasizes only defensive capabilities.”<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of the name change, arguing that the US had “an unbelievable history of victory” in both world wars under the previous name. <\/p>\n
He has also expressed optimism that lawmakers would support such a change. <\/p>\n
“I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t even think we need that,” the president said last week. “But, if we need that, I’m sure Congress will go along.” <\/p>\n
Trump and Hegseth have sought to refocus the department on “warfighting” and a “warrior ethos”.<\/p>\n
They have argued that the department has become too focused on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and “woke ideology”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump is directing that the Pentagon be known as the Department of War. He will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-115222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}