Why? Good question. Both answer this query by saying that this is one way of bringing the "warfighter" ethos back to the Pentagon.
Warfighter? Trump missed Vietnam for crippling bone spurs that obviously have not prevented him from playing golf.
Hegseth joined the National Guard and served for 11 months in Guantanamo Bay and briefly in Iraq and Afghanistan. While he received a Bronze Star and an Oak Leaf cluster, he was barred from serving in the Guard by the Biden administration on grounds of extremist views based on his various tattoos.
He has since rejected those and other allegations. But his qualifications, largely with Fox News, for serving as Secretary of Defense and now Secretary of War are the most modest since those of the disgraced Louis Johnson during the Truman administration.
So, two of the least qualified Commanders-in-Chief and Defense Secretaries are changing the Department of Defense to this new war-fighting footing. The first question is: What was the last -- or first -- war the United States won that it started?
The Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 is the first and only. A decade in Vietnam, eight years in Iraq and 20 years in Afghanistan were ignominious defeats.
The United States won the Cold War-- a war it did not start. And despite undue credit being assigned to the Reagan administration to winning it by bankrupting the Soviet Union, that is a nice myth. The Soviet Union imploded for a simple reason. Its political system was irrational based on constant lies and exaggerations regarding the health of its economy and society.
By the time Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in 1985 at age 54, he replaced a gerontocracy of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, who were too infirm to govern. Having moved portfolios, Gorbachev knew how badly the state of the USSR was. A devoted communist, he imposed Perestroika (reconstruction) and Glasnost (openness) to repair the broken system.
The effect was the absolute opposite. The USSR's centrally controlled economy and government could not tolerate reform. Ministries and ministers survived by falsifying records of how well each agency performed. It was nonsense. Bye-bye Soviet Union.
So, now the finest military in the world serves under a newly named organization called the Department of War, despite America's clouded record in waging war since 1945. Of course, the name "Department of Defense was enshrined" in legislation by passage of the 1949 amendment to the National Security Act that created it. Perhaps a supine Congress may not agree with the new name. We will see.
But the idea of a Department of War is absurd when even a superficial analysis of war is conducted. The current National Defense Strategy, perhaps to be renamed the National War Strategy, has three objectives: compete/contain, deter, and if war comes, defeat a number of potential enemies headed by China and Russia. Yet, how is the United States to compete and how is success or failure to be measured? No one has said.
Who has been contained or deterred? Russia has twice invaded Ukraine. China is unconstrained in how it has increased its influence and economic and military power. Finally, can anyone fight and win a war that could escalate to the use of thermonuclear weapons, 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945? Of course not.
If war were non-nuclear with China, Russia or both, as the conflict in Ukraine has shown, it may be long. The U.S. defense industrial base is incapable of providing the weapons and logistics demanded by a long war. And even if trillions of dollars were spent, it would take years for changes to take effect. The point is that war is not a good idea.
Hence, why is the name Department of War needed? In a thermonuclear age when the costs of people and weapons are astronomical, is not "defense" a more appropriate term?
Obviously, the president and the field marshal do not agree with that logic. One wonders if anyone in uniform has a backbone to respond? Or perhaps firing a Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; two female service chiefs and some two dozen other senior officers for what seems a lack of cause has numbed the military into silence.
In that case, I guess Department of War fits.
Harlan Ullman is UPI's Arnaud de Borchgrave Distinguished Columnist; senior adviser at Washington's Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former U.K. chief of defense and due out next year, is Who Thinks Best Wins: Preventing Strategic Catastrophe. The writer can be reached on X @harlankullman.
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