President Donald Trump warned that there will be ‘hell to pay’ if Russia-Ukraine war does not end, as he rebranded the US Department of Defence as the Department of War.
The president signed an executive order today reverting to the agency’s original name.
‘Either the war in Ukraine will end or there will be hell to pay,’ said Trump after signing an executive order in the Oval Office for the renaming.
Trump claimed that former President Harry Truman changed the agency’s name to the Department of Defence in 1947 for ‘political correctness’ and because the nation ‘decided to go woke’.
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He added that the US has not won a ‘major war since changing the name’ and that the renaming sends a message of ‘victory’.
‘We chose to be politically correct and woke-y and we just fight forever,’ Trump said.
‘We wouldn’t lose, we would just fight, or to tie, we never wanted to win.’
Although the current stamp is set out in law, the move introduces a ‘secondary title’, states a White House document.
Trump’s administration is implementing a ‘warrior ethos’ within the Pentagon, and introduced phrases such as ‘Secretary of War’ for Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.
Speaking to Fox & Friends on Wednesday, Hegseth said: ‘We won WWI, and we won WWII, not with the Department of Defence, but with a War Department, with the Department of War.
‘We’ve reestablished at the department the warrior ethos.
‘We want warriors, folks that understand how to exact lethality on the enemy.
‘We don’t want endless contingencies and just playing defence.
‘We think words and names and titles matter.
‘So, we’re working with the White House and the president on it.
‘Stand by.’
Trump previously claimed the Department of Defence is too ‘defensive.’
Speaking to the media last month, he said the Department of War ‘was the name when we won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything.’
According to the White House document, the name change ‘conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve.’
But not everyone is convinced.
Navy combat veteran and retired NASA astronaut Captain Mark Kelly said on X: ‘Only someone who avoided the draft would want to rename the Department of Defence to the Department of War.’
On Friday, the president also announced that the Group of 20 summit next year in December will take place at his Trump National Doral golf club near Miami.
Trump brushed off ethical concerns and said ‘everybody wants it there’ and that ‘it’s the best location’ next to the airport.
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