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What’s In a Name? The “Defense” Department Has Always Been About War.

Washington reserves for itself the unilateral right to intervene, violently and antidemocratically, in the affairs of other nations to secure what it considers its interests.

The reversion of the Defense Department to the War Department should be seen less as a rupture than a revelation. It strips away a euphemism to make far plainer what has long been the reality of our world.

Tom Dispatch, By Eric Ross, September 18, 2025

The renaming of the Defense Department should have surprised no one. Donald Trump is an incipient fascist doing what such figures do. Surrounded by a coterie of illiberal ideologues and careerist sycophants, he and his top aides have dispensed with pretense and precedent, moving at breakneck speed to demolish what remains of the battered façade of American democracy.

In eight months, his second administration has unleashed a shock-and-awe assault on norms and institutions, civil liberties, human rights, and history itself. But fascism never respects borders. Fascists don’t recognize the rule of law. They consider themselves the law. Expansion and the glorification of war are their lifeblood. Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini put it all too bluntly: the fascist “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace… war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”

Pete Hegseth is now equally blunt. From the Pentagon, he’s boasting of restoring a “warrior ethos” to the armed forces, while forging an offensive military that prizes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” The message couldn’t be clearer: when the U.S. loses wars, as it has done consistently despite commanding the most powerful military in history, it’s not due to imperial overreach, political arrogance, or popular resistance. Rather, defeat stems from that military having gone “woke,” a euphemism for failing to kill enough people.

The recent rechristening of the Department of Defense as the Department of War was certainly a culture-war stunt like Trump’s demand that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. But it also signaled something more insidious: a blunt escalation of the criminal logic that has long underwritten U.S. militarism. That logic sustained both the Cold War of the last century and the War on Terror of this one, destroying millions of lives.

When Hegseth defended the recent summary executions of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers on a boat in the Caribbean, he boasted that Washington possesses “absolute and complete authority” to kill anywhere without Congressional approval or evidence of a wrong and in open defiance of international law. The next day, in responding on X to a user who called what had been done a war crime, Vance wrote, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” It was the starkest admission since the Iraq War that Washington no longer pretends to operate internationally under the rule of law but under the rule of force, where might quite simply makes right.

While such an escalation of verbiage — the brazen confession of an imperial power that believes itself immune from accountability — should alarm us, it’s neither unprecedented nor unexpected. Peace, after all, has never been the profession of the U.S. military. The Department of Defense has always been the Department of War.

American Imperialism and “Star-Spangled Fascism”

The U.S. has long denied being an empire. From its founding, imperialism was cast as the antithesis of American values. This nation, after all, was born in revolt against the tyranny of foreign rule. Yet for a country so insistent on not being an empire, Washington has followed a trajectory nearly indistinguishable from its imperial predecessors. Its history was defined by settler conquest, the violent elimination of Indigenous peoples, and a long record of covert and overt interventions to topple governments unwilling to yield to American political or economic domination.

The record is unmistakable. As Noam Chomsky once put it, “Talking about American imperialism is like talking about triangular triangles.” And he was hardly the first to suggest such a thing. In the 1930s, General Smedley Butler, reflecting with searing candor on his years of military service in Latin America, described himself as “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests… I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

Historically, imperialism and fascism went hand in hand. As Aimé Césaire argued in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, fascism is imperialism turned inward. The violence inherent in colonial domination can, in the end, never be confined to the colonies, which means that what we’re now witnessing in the Trumpian era is a reckoning. The chickens are indeed coming home to roost or, as Noura Erakat recently observed, “The boomerang comes back.”……………………………………………………………

Imperialism incubates fascism, a dynamic evident in the carnage of World War I, rooted, as W.E.B. DuBois observed at the time, in colonial competition that laid the foundations for World War II. In that conflict, Césaire argued, the Nazis applied to Europe the methods and attitudes that until then were reserved for colonized peoples, unleashing them on Europeans with similarly genocidal effect.

War is Peace

In the postwar years, the United States emerged from the ruins of Europe as the unrivaled global hegemon. With some six percent of the world’s population, it commanded nearly half of the global gross domestic product. Anchored by up to 2,000 military bases across the globe (still at 800 today), it became the new imperial power on which the sun never set. Yet Washington ignored the fundamental lesson inherent in Europe’s self-cannibalization. Rather than dismantle the machinery of empire, it embraced renewed militarism. Rather than demobilize, it placed itself on a permanent global war footing, both anticipating and accelerating the Cold War with that other great power of the period, the Soviet Union.

The United States was, however, a superpower defined as much by paranoia and insecurity as by military and economic strength. It was in such a climate that American officials moved to abandon the title of the Department of War in 1947, rebranding it as the Department of Defense two years later. The renaming sought to reassure the world that, despite every sign the U.S. had assumed the mantle of European colonialism, its intentions were benign and defensive in nature………………………………………………………………………….

“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence”

As with the CIA, the not-so-aptly-renamed “Defense Department” would oversee a succession of catastrophic wars that did nothing to make Americans safer and had little to do with the protection of democratic values. Within a year of its renaming, the U.S. was at war in Korea. When the North invaded the South in 1950, seeking to reunify a peninsula divided by foreign powers, Washington rushed to intervene, branding it a “police action,” the first of many Orwellian linguistic maneuvers to sidestep the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 Washington reserves for itself the unilateral right to intervene, violently and antidemocratically, in the affairs of other nations to secure what it considers its interests. The reversion of the Defense Department to the War Department should be seen less as a rupture than a revelation. It strips away a euphemism to make far plainer what has long been the reality of our world.

We now face a choice. As historian Christian Appy has reminded us, “The institutions that sustain empire destroy democracy.” That truth is unfolding before our eyes. As the Pentagon budget tops one trillion dollars and the machinery of war only expands in Donald Trump’s America, the country also seems to be turning further inward. Only recently, President Trump threatened to use Chicago to demonstrate “why it is called the Department of War.” Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or ICE, is set to become among the most well-funded domestic “military” forces on the planet and potentially the private paramilitary of an aspiring autocrat.

If there is any hope of salvaging this country’s (not to speak of this planet’s) future, then this history has to be faced, and we must recover — or perhaps discover — our moral bearings. That will require not prolonging the death throes of American hegemony, but dismantling imperial America before it collapses on itself and takes us all with it.

Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, and PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst https://tomdispatch.com/whats-in-a-name/

September 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Department of War Is Back!

But Victoryless Culture Remains.

 William J. Astore, 17 Sept 25, https://tomdispatch.com/the-department-of-war-is-back/

My fellow Americans, my critical voice has finally been heard inside the Oval Office. No, not my voice against the $1.7 trillion this country is planning to spend on new nuclear weapons. No, not my call to cut the Pentagon budget in half. No, not my imprecations against militarism in America. It was a quip of mine that the Department of Defense (DoD) should return to its roots as the War Department, since the U.S. hasn’t known a moment’s peace since before the 9/11 attacks, locked as it’s been into a permanent state of global war, whether against “terror” or for its imperial agendas (or both)

A rebranded Department of War, President Trump recently suggested, simply sounds tougher (and more Trumpian) than “defense.” As is his wont, he blurted out a hard truth as he stated that America must have an offensive military. There was, however, no mention of war bonds or war taxes to pay for such a military. And no mention of a wartime draft or any other meaningful sacrifice by most Americans.

September 20, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US Bombs Another Boat Near Venezuela.

President Trump claimed without evidence that the boat was running drugs and that the strike killed three ‘terrorists’

by Dave DeCamp | September 15, 2025 , https://news.antiwar.com/2025/09/15/us-bombs-another-boat-near-venezuela/

The US military on Monday bombed a boat near Venezuela and killed three people, according to a statement released by President Trump on Truth Social.

President Trump claimed without providing evidence that the boat was carrying drugs and that the three people who were killed were “narcoterrorists.” He made similar claims about the first US military strike on a boat near Venezuela that occurred on September 2, which he said killed 11 “narcoterrorists.”

The president also posted a video that purported to show the Monday strike. It showed what appeared to be a boat that was drifting at sea, followed by an explosion.

“This morning, on my Orders, US Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump said. “The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the US.”

The president also signaled that more US strikes on boats in the region were coming. “BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” he wrote.

The second US bombing in the region came after the Venezuelan government said that personnel from a US warship boarded a Venezuelan tuna boat that was in Venezuelan waters. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil said 18 armed US troops were on the vessel for 8 hours, a claim that hasn’t been confirmed by the US military.

“Those who give the order to carry out such provocations are seeking an incident that would justify a military escalation in the Caribbean,” Gil said.

While Trump and other US officials claim the military action and pressure on Venezuela’s government is about drug trafficking and a response to overdose deaths in the US, fentanyl doesn’t come from or through Venezuela, and the majority of the cocaine that is transported to the US comes through the Pacific, not the Caribbean. Gil said that the real purpose of the US operations was for the US to “persist in their failed policy” of regime change in Venezuela.

The Venezuela policy is being largely driven by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long pushed for regime change in Venezuela. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Monday called out Rubio in response to the US boarding the tuna boat, calling him a “lord of death and war.”

September 20, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The dangerous new Washington consensus for more nuclear weapons

What are all these nuclear weapons for? What would happen if we used them? Or a fraction of them? How many would die? Would our nation survive? What would be the impact on global climate?

These are topics that are assiduously avoided by nuclear weapons proponents,

“We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”

By Joe Cirincione | September 9, 2025

Two former Biden administration defense officials warn of a “Category 5 hurricane of nuclear threats” rapidly approaching. Their solution? Build more nuclear weapons.

The officials, Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi, develop their strategy in a July 17 article in Foreign Affairs. From their perches at the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, they helped guide President Joe Biden’s nuclear policies that kept—and even increased—the weapons programs and budgets inherited from the first Trump administration. Now, they say, we need more.

Much more.

Attempting to chart a course for “how to survive the new nuclear age,” they instead repeat the oldest strategic mistake of the nuclear age: seeking security through numbers.

Eighty years ago, before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a team of Manhattan Project scientists led by James Franck and Eugene Rabinowitz (who would later found The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) warned that the United States could not rely on its current advantage in atomic weaponry. Nuclear research would not remain an American monopoly for long. Staying ahead in production, they said, also gave a false sense of security: “The accumulation of a larger number of bigger and better atomic bombs… will not make us safe from sudden attack.”

They were ignored. During its first nuclear build-up, the United States sprinted from two atomic weapons in 1945 to 20,000 atomic and thermonuclear weapons by 1960, over twenty times the number of weapons held by the Soviet Union. It didn’t matter. We were ahead but afraid, with false fears of “missile gaps” dominating security debates.

Twenty years later, with the US arsenal at 24,000 warheads and the Soviets with 30,000, Ronald Reagan was swept into office with the backing of the Committee on the Present Danger and their fears that a “window of vulnerability” was opening that would allow the Soviets to launch a deadly first strike unless we vastly increased our forces. Committee members filled top defense posts and began the second nuclear build-up with new weapons and the false promise of missile defense shields. The “launch on warning” policy they adopted on an “interim basis” to protect US ICBMs from Russian attack still haunts us today, argues Princeton professor Frank von Hippel. This policy has contributed to several close calls when missiles were almost mistakenly launched.

Narang and Vaddi channel these past prophets of doom. The authors cite nuclear programs in North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran as justification for increasing the size of the US arsenal, largely ignoring diplomatic efforts that in the past effectively contained some of these programs and prevented others.

They also cite the interest of US allies in Europe and Asia in considering their own national nuclear programs as a proliferation risk that can only be addressed by  “more, different, and better nuclear capabilities” and “more advanced missile defense… to intercept small or residual adversary nuclear forces.” They argue that if confronted by nuclear threats in Europe in the near future, “the United States might need to respond with nuclear use, and potentially with a larger nuclear exchange if it is unable to reestablish nuclear deterrence in Europe.”…………………………….

They fully endorse the third nuclear build up now underway, with an estimated cost of $2 trillion and rising. But it is not enough. “Washington needs to deploy not only more warheads but also more systems than originally planned under the modernization program,” they urge.

It is true that China’s force may grow, but as experts at the Federation of American Scientists point out, these projections are based on some questionable assumptions, including that future growth will follow recent growth on a straight line, that all the ICBM silos that we observe will be filled by new missiles, that China will be able to produce enough plutonium for all these new warheads, and that all the new warheads will be operational and deployed—which they currently are not.

Secondly, the authors understate the current US nuclear arsenal, which is more than 3,700 operational warheads, not 1,500. The United States currently has about 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed. (The New START treaty counts only 1,550 because it assumes each US bomber is loaded with only one weapon rather than the 8 to 20 they can carry.)

But that is only the deployed force. Approximately 1,930 nuclear warheads are held in reserve, ready to be deployed if needed. Finally, there are 1,477 retired but still intact warheads awaiting dismantlement—making for a total of more than 5,177 warheads in all, including those deployed, those on reserve, and those which are formally retired but intact. So, even if China does produce 1,500 weapons in ten years, it will still have only one-third the US force.

The real problem with the authors’ analysis, however, is not threat exaggeration or funny numbers. It is the war-fighting doctrine that it openly embraces.

What are all these nuclear weapons for? What would happen if we used them? Or a fraction of them? How many would die? Would our nation survive? What would be the impact on global climate?

These are topics that are assiduously avoided by nuclear weapons proponents, whether they be the corporations that realize large profits from the now $100 billion annual nuclear budget, or by the academics and policy operatives who provide the strategic justification for the indefinite continuation of the nuclear balance of terror.

Thus, the authors say “Congress will need to back an accelerated effort to overhaul the U.S. arsenal with significant funding and give the project urgent priority” because in addition to the standard rational that the United States must maintain a large nuclear arsenal “able to survive a first strike and impose assured destruction on its attacker in retaliation,” they argue the US must have weapons and policies “to meaningfully limit the amount of damage the attacker can inflict on the United States and its allies. To do this, the United States must maintain the capability to destroy as many of the attacker’s nuclear weapons as practicable before or after they are launched.”

This “damage limitation” strategy is key to the argument for larger forces. The authors seem to favor using US nuclear weapons first, to destroy the enemy’s weapons “before” they are launched, as well as believing without evidence that there could be a national missile defense system so effective that it could destroy missiles “after” their launch.

Former dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Affairs Robert Gallucci writes in his brief rebuttal to the authors: “One is left to wonder how the pursuit of all the ‘counterforce’ capability required of the second part of the strategy—an extraordinary characterization of the traditional goal of ‘damage limitation’ laid out in past U.S. nuclear posture reviews—can be distinguished from the pursuit of a disarming, preemptive, ‘first strike’ capability.”

Indeed, that is precisely what may be motivating the Chinese increases that the authors claim as the justification for an urgent US build-up. Narang and Vaddi do not discuss the impact on other nations of the massive US investment in offensive and defensive nuclear systems over the past ten years, or its withdrawal form the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 that began the deterioration of the arms control regime.

From the Chinese perspective, however, the new, more capable and proliferated offensive nuclear weapons (especially those close to their borders) must indeed appear to be first-strike weapons, particularly when combined with a massive proposed national missile defense system erected to intercept any missiles not destroyed by an initial barrage of the United States.

China expert Fiona Cunningham of the University of Pennsylvania believes that it is very possible that “China is reacting to the continued development of some of the U.S. capabilities that could hold its nuclear arsenal at risk.” These include national missile defense, “its development of conventional strike capabilities that might be able to degrade its nuclear forces,” and the “idea that you would try and attack an adversary’s nuclear forces before they end up being launched.”

The Trump administration’s decision to “go on the offense” will further exacerbate these concerns. As the newly renamed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said: “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”

The Chinese increase in forces may indeed be malevolent. But it also looks very similar to what one would do if trying to create exactly the kind of survivable force the authors say the United States must have for a credible deterrent. As Cunningham notes, “We should expect that if adversary capabilities change, then Chinese nuclear forces are going to change in tandem.”

The authors may intend to pave new ground, to develop a strategy for the “new nuclear age,” but they end up mirroring the failed policies of the past. In many ways, their article echoes the 1980 Foreign Policy article by nuclear hawks Colin Gray and Keith Payne, “Victory is Possible.”  In support of that era’s nuclear modernization, they argued that “the United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally.” They, too, thought arms control was unattainable and out-of-date with current threats. They, too, thought “parity or essential equivalence is incompatible with extended deterrence.”  They, too, claimed that “war-fighting… is an extension of the American theory of deterrence.”

Gray and Payne said that a war that resulted in 20 million dead Americans could still save 200 million or more. Narang and Vaddi are not as cavalier, but at the core, they are embracing the idea that the ability to fight and win a nuclear war is essential for national security.

The worst news is that they are not alone. Their views may be the dominant views in Washington now, in both parties. Cloaked in ominous strategic rhetoric, ignoring inconvenient truths, and backed by a formidable nuclear weapons lobby and massive budgets, these ideas are the new consensus. Without a vibrant, persistent pushback, these policies will not only prevail in the current Trump administration but in future governments as well. https://thebulletin.org/2025/09/the-dangerous-new-washington-consensus-for-more-nuclear-weapons/

September 12, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment