Trump signs executive order rebranding Defense Department as Department of War

The order permits the use of titles like "secretary of war" but it does not formally rename the department. That would require congressional approval.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a more bellicose alternative that echoes the agency's 18th-century name.

"I think it sends a message of victory. I think it sends really a message of strength. We're very strong. We're much stronger than anyone would really understand," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after signing the order.

Trump had signaled during his second term an interest in changing the name to the original version from 1789, criticizing the Defense Department name as not fully reflective of its priority — winning wars. He told reporters Friday that he finalized the decision after "talking about it for months" and asserted the original name was only changed because the government at the time went "woke."

President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order as the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looks on in the Oval Office of the White House, on Friday.Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images"We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense," Trump said. "So we're going Department of War."

Democratic President Harry Truman oversaw the first name change — from the Department of War to the National Military Establishment — by signing the National Security Act of 1947, which organized all military services into a single entity led by a secretary of defense.