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> the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda

Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.

Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.

The millions of deaths are still happening, they just aren't our boys so we were all cool with it.

They haven’t, though. In the decades that followed World War 2, creation of the UN etc, the number of people dying in warfare and civilian death due to war dropped dramatically.

No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.

They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have continued apace, everywhere from the Congo to Cambodia. At the time they were novelties in 'the civilised' world.

I asked ChatGPT to compute the rate of total deaths (civilians + military) since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Here's what it came up with:

    Period.     Approx average deaths from war
    1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
    1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
    1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
    1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year

I know AI is not 100% reliable but it searched on many sources to compute that. I checked some of them and the conclusion is in line with them.

Here's the "bottomline":

> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.

TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.

Alas we're seeing a reversion to historical norms. The "civilized" world was a temporary and localized phenomenon. The usual pattern in conflicts between societies was always genocide: kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, smash the cultural artifacts, and steal anything of value. Probably thousands of societies have been utterly erased that way. Hopefully we can arrest the gradual worldwide regression to barbarism but I'm not optimistic.

People love repeating this stuff, a form of navel-gazing: 'Norms' is used by bad people to support their obviously bad ideas - 'I know this sucks, but it's inevitable!'.

Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.

https://ourworldindata.org/conflict-deaths-breakdown - certainly has been in the millions - maybe lower in the 'Western world' but countless of the dead in wars across the world in ww2, have been civilians.

For example 3 to 5 million were killed in the 2nd Congo war of 1998-2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

They are. They just are killed in utero instead of on the front lines.

I for one am happy the US is not being as hypocritical as to call its military department the Department of Defense anymore. The US has initiated or participated directly in many, many wars since the UN was founded, and none of them were in self defense - no country on Earth would be foolish enough to attack the US (arguably, Al-Kaeda did it, but they're not a country and Afghanistan was essentially scapegoated). Yet, we have a long list of conflicts the US either started outright, or entered on its own volition for reasons that just can't be called self-defense by any sane person: Korea (1950), Vietnam (1960s and 1970s), Libya (1980s), Iraq and Balkans (1990s), Afghanistan (2000s), Syria + Iraq + Libya (2010s) and now Iran. Not to mention the many CIA-led regime changes it instigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Surely Iraq was the main scapegoat? I've never quite understood how a Saudi national (who hated the secular Saddam Hussein) hiding in Afghanistan caused Iraq to be attacked.

> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.

…which is the bad thing being discussed, yes. I don’t really understand why “there used to be one” would be exonerative. Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use. Lines up with the “adult children” theory. Skip the actual work, (which would involve addressing the nation and justifying this change in posture), instead focus on the performative.

As we are seeing in real time with Iran, “we’ll just war!” was a juvenile idea, committed to with near-zero forethought or planning.

> Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use.

It's wild how people are just going along with it, too. They didn't officially change the name of anything. Why are journalists and people outside of the administration's orbit using the "preferred" but fake name?

Hey, “Gulf of America”!

To maintain access mostly

Starting the war with Iran was definitely a pretty stupid decision, even at this point of it. In a couple of years it will look like the beginning of the end for the US hegemony.

No it won't, that's merely fantasy projection (a personal desire for the US to suffer for what it's doing). US hegemony ended with the rise of China's economy into superpower status over the past 10-15 years. There was no scenario where the relatively brief US hegemony from the late 1980s to the late 2000s was going to continue no matter what the US did. China was always going to build a military to match its economic might. That military will gradually project globally.

US hegemony lasted for a mere ~20 years. Today it does not possess hegemony, China is able to stand-off fully with the US both economically and militarily (at least in Asia).

Iran is a regional conflict. It will matter less than the Iraq war and occupation did.

Maybe. But the Iran conflict also ties in with the Ukraine war, which is an assertion of Russian power into that US-Europe/China duopoly. And it's happening at the same time as the former alliance is breaking.

It's possible that it will be a regional conflict the way the Serbian/Austro-Hungarian conflict was regional. Or the way people pretended that the Germany/Sudetenland conflict was regional.

I don't wish to catastophize. But I also think it's important to realize that this does have the potential to become much worse very suddenly. That doesn't make the decisions easy, but they shouldn't be easy.

Nonsense. China remains unable to project power much beyond the first island chain. They're building fast and that will change in a few years but as of today their conventional military capabilities remain very limited and defensive. When was the last time a Chinese carrier strike group deployed to the Middle East?

If US hegemony is total, why is there no oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz?

Why does the US economy rely so heavily on chips manufactured in Taiwan, and on components, products, and services provided by China?

The difference between the US and China is that China understands that carrier strike groups are not the modern definition of hegemony.

There has never been any such thing as "total" hegemony, so that's a strawman argument. The US doesn't get much oil from the Strait of Hormuz and so while starting another war with Iran was a stupid move, the consequences are largely someone else's problem. I agree that depending on other countries for strategically critical manufacturing was a bad move. Fortunately that's now being rectified but it will take some time.

https://www.semiconductors.org/chips/

China's attempts at hegemony have largely consisted of making loans on bad terms to corrupt developing countries and then trying to foreclose when they don't pay. This has not worked.

Starting the war with Iraq in 2003 was definitely a pretty stupid decision, and at the time some pundits predicted that it was the beginning of the end for US hegemony. But now a couple decades later the US is still looking pretty hegemonic. US hegemony will end some day, but we should be skeptical of predictions about timing.

Let’s revisit this comment in 2030. Iran is very different from Iraq in many ways.

For the 2003 Iraq war, US managed to goad 48 countries to get involved [1] For the 2026 Iran war, it looks more like the US was goaded itself. The current coalition consists of Israel and a dozen of Middle East countries providing bases to stage the war. If you squint, it is still looking hegemonic but nothing like what was 20 years ago.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...

This take is extremely arrogant. You can make the argument that shuffling the deck like this will lead to unexpected outcomes but claiming one way or the other to know the outcome is just silly.

If anyone feels sure they know what the next several years has in store regarding Iran they are just demonstrating their own ignorance. I’d expect more people here to be cognisant of the Dunning Kruger effect.

I obviously don’t know what the future has in store for us.

But I’m pretty sure that any imaginable outcome of this war will be bad for the US, at a time where they are withdrawing from global politics to concentrate on national politics.

IMO worst case this will lead to a massive civil war in the US and best case to a devaluation of US military might (aka their army will be less respected/feared). Or anything in between.

We can revisit this comment in a couple years and laugh about how wrong i was though

This war is like going to the dentist for a root canal. No one likes it, OTOH none of neighboring countries want a second "north Korea" as their neighbor. Time will tell.

Like going to the dentist for a root canal when it's your neighbors that actually needs one and you can't afford it because a significant portion of your income is already paying down debt, the problem is getting worse, and you just decided to make less money this year

It's like going to a hardware store for a root canal. The goal might be laudable, but the execution and results are just as important.

> The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration, and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary

Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:

The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.

https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/02/philadelphia-mint-c...

We can soon rename "Dept of War" into "Dept of Debt".

USA= United States of Accounts payable

Famed spy fiction writer Tom Clancy surely knows the provenance of the name Department of War.

Better to have two names for one thing than one name for two, that's my view.

Exactly

Suspicious.

Totally different guy actually. The author died in 2013. I was briefly experiencing a bit of disgust at the idea that they were now ghostwriting blog posts as him, before clicking around the site.

> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.

The “Dept of War” naming is not aimed at our adversaries. It’s aimed internally. It’s chest beating from man children who want desperately to identify as “alpha males”.

The same man who calls himself the “president of peace” unilaterally renamed the department of defense. It’s entirely legitimate to call this out as nonsense.

> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.

“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”

Seems like a stupid and immature reason enough to me.

Just to add, it was in the process of manufacture during Biden, signed into production during Trump. A unfortunately timed nothing burger.

Not to say that War is Peace folks won’t jump on it.

In an alternate universe, Kamala Harris might be in Iran now. But her choice of SECDEF would be competent. No less than 1M Americans are more qualified than Hegseth; for the first time, I think.

The current preferred name is Department of Defense. Ask anyone who isn’t incompetence aligned.

That's the official name. The preferred one by the government is Dept of War. [1]

As the original poster said:

> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/09/fact-sheet-pr...

Well I think the operative question here is “preferred by who?”. The current government prefers it. Voters do not. None of us are obligated to indulge the “secondary title” nonsense in an executive order clearly designed to sidestep the actual legal process for a name change.