The secretary of defense position came into being after the Second World War, as part of the sweeping 1947 National Security Act. Before then, the nation had a War Department, which oversaw the Army, and a separate Navy Department. With the Cold War on the horizon, the 1947 act greatly expanded the scope of the national-security state to confront the Soviet threat; for example, the U.S. Air Force and CIA are both creations of the act. A 1949 amendment formally brought the armed forces under a single civilian leader, and renamed the new entity the Department of Defense. By changing the department’s name, Congress also endorsed an expansionist view of the new department’s mission. For the U.S. military, the 77 years that followed the act’s passage ushered in an era of unprecedented nation-building and humanitarian missions all over the world.
The Defense Department’s massive growth since 1947 enabled the type of interventionist foreign policy that Trump ran against. It has also come at the expense of other departments and agencies, such as the State Department and USAID. The agencies whose missions most closely align with the projection of nonmilitary power are perennially underresourced, and reduced to secondary roles. Too often, the face of U.S. diplomacy wears a uniform. During the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, an underresourced State Department relied on soldiers to perform civic tasks that the military was poorly equipped to handle. The result was two more post-1947 failed wars.
The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the First and Second World Wars were all fought and won by the War Department. Before 1947, when we had a War Department, Americans were able to boast that they had never lost a war. When the United States fought fewer major wars, its uninterrupted string of victories was a point of national pride. Since the creation of the Defense Department, the U.S. has never won a major war. Muddled outcomes such as those in Korea and Iraq are the closest thing it might claim to success.
A philosophy of defense has proved ineffective (if not disastrous) when compared with the more focused philosophy of war. Perhaps the War Department was less likely to fight wars, because its name made the department’s purpose more difficult to sugarcoat and obfuscate. A war department speaks in terms of victory and defeat. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt never spoke of exit strategies, nor did generals such as Ulysses S. Grant, John Pershing, and Dwight D. Eisenhower wring their hands about “boots on the ground.” If you want a clear strategy for winning wars, don’t play a semantic game with the name of the department that’s charged with the strategy’s execution. Call things what they are. The mandate of a war department is right there in its name.