This action might save trillions of dollars when the future generations will see all this money going to war, instead of "defense". And you are worried about a few million it might take to rebrand?
It’s not Gen Z or the Alphas (“future generations”) are thirsting for war. It’s still going to the same organization no matter what we call it.
It’s just a fig leaf argument to justify a colossal waste of money and time.
The DoD has many problems but the name isn’t one of them.
After all, "War and Peace" had a working title "War, what is it good for" before his mistress insisted he change it.
I suspect that you are being facetious, but for the benefit of anyone else reading, this is not true. It's a "factoid" (an invented fact mistaken as true)[1] spawned from a joke on the TV program Seinfeld[2].
This has been your daily wet blanket.
(Unless, of course, you were saying "Boooourrrns")
In reality the majority of the US military budget does not go to defence in the colloquial sense, it's far more about projecting US power globally (which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you think that the US is projecting it's power for good).
"War" is a better description and sounds less innocent than "defence" would imply, although I think you could argue that even this is a slightly misleading description.
We had a War Department. Rebranding to Defense was a PR move to hide what was really happening.
This is a good thing as it’s far more truthful.
No, its not; not that the implicit equation of “how it used to be” with “how it ought to be” is valid to start with.
> We had a War Department. Rebranding to Defense was a PR move to hide what was really happening.
No. We had a War Department that was the agency responsible for the Army, including what was then the Army Air Forces, and a Navy Department that was the agency responsible for the Navy including the Marine Corps. Splitting and rebranding the former to the two Departments of the Army and Air Force was done to simultaneously more accurately reflect its responsibilities and to address the growing significance of air power.
This split was simultaneous with the old and now split up War Department and the old but keeping its name Navy Department being subordinated to the new consolidated military establishment named the Department of Defense, but the Defense Department wasn’t a new name for the War Dpartment, it was the name for a completely new thing placed above the older, separate military departments.