President Donald Trump will sign an executive order renaming the Department of Defense on Friday to its former namesake.
The president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have indicated to officials that they want to change the name of the agency back to the Department of War, as part of the president’s ‘warrior ethos’ campaign within the Pentagon, Fox News reports.
A White House official has since confirmed that Trump will roll out the name change on Friday in an executive order that calls for the term ‘Department of War’ to be used as a secondary title to the Department of Defense and terms like ‘Secretary of War’ to refer to Hegseth’s position.
The order also instructs Hegseth to propose legislative and executive actions to make the name change permanent.
Implementing the executive order will now require the federal government to change its websites, as well as signage at the Pentagon – including changing the name for the press briefing room to the ‘Pentagon War Annex,’ a White House official told Fox News.
The president has suggested over the past few days that he was planning to change the name of the department.
‘Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War,’ he told reporters on August 25. ‘Then we changed it to Department of Defense.’
Hegseth has also expressed his support for the name change, and has even started referring to himself as the Secretary of War.
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War on Friday
Implementing the executive order will now require the federal government to change its websites, as well as signage at the Pentagon
‘We won WWI, and we won WWII, not with the Department of Defense, but with… the Department of War,’ he said in an interview Wednesday on Fox & Friends.
‘As the president has said, we’re not just defense, we’re offense.’
Hegseth added that the president has ‘reestablished at the Department the warrior ethos.
‘We want warriors, folks that understand how to exact lethality on the enemy. We don’t want endless contingencies and just playing defense,’ Hegseth said.
‘We think words and names and titles matter. So we’re working with the White House and the president on it,’ he added.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.