President Donald Trump said he wants to bring back a long-retired title: secretary of war. Why was it dropped in the first place?
Trump brought up the idea of a name change while introducing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a June 25 press conference in the Netherlands, which hosted this year’s NATO summit.
“You know, it used to be called secretary of war,” the president said. “Maybe for a couple of weeks we’ll call it that because we feel like warriors.”
“In fact, if you look at the old building next to the White House, you can see where it used to be secretary of war,” Trump added. “Then we became politically correct and they called it secretary of defense. Maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”
Here’s why the secretary of war came to be known as the secretary of defense. Secretary of war
The title of secretary of war dates back to the founding of the United States.
In 1789, shortly after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, President George Washington signed legislation establishing the War Department, according to the Department of Defense.
The new department was tasked with overseeing and maintaining the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, all of which were set up three years earlier.
Washington chose Henry Knox, one of his aides during the Revolutionary War — and the namesake of Fort Knox — to serve as its first secretary.
Then, less than a decade later, in 1798, the scope of the department shrank, when management of the Navy was handed over to the newly formed Navy Department. And, in 1834, the Marine Corps was moved under the Navy Department, leaving just the Army under the War Department.
In 1879, following the Civil War, the War Department took up headquarters in the newly built Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It was then referred to as the State-War-Navy Building — as Trump referenced in his recent press conference. --
In 1947, during the aftermath of World War II, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which combined the War and Navy Departments, as well as the newly formed Air Force, into one organization known as the National Military Establishment.
This new organization was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949, according to Dartmouth University records.
James Forrestal, who had previously served as the secretary of the Navy, then became the nation’s first secretary of defense.
This title has remained in use ever since then, with Hegseth being the country’s 29th secretary of defense.
The Pentagon said Thursday that more than $5 billion is being budgeted in the upcoming year for the Trump administration's military operation at the U.S. southern border -- and that some unrelated military projects may need to be pushed aside.
But defense officials, who briefed the press on annual budget plans, said they are betting on a Trump agenda bill in Congress to backfill any money pulled from current military funds to pay for border operations. The services have paid for the deployment[1] of thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to Los Angeles amid immigration raid protests by shifting funds meant for barracks and other operations.
The budget plans for fiscal 2026 were released -- though with less detail than was typical of past Defense Department budgets -- as President Donald Trump is pursuing mass deportations across the country and expanding the role of the military in immigration and border security, including surging troops to the Mexico border and creating new military zones there.
Defense officials spoke to the press about the budget plans only on condition of anonymity. In the past, the Pentagon has rolled out its annual budgets with military and civilian officials speaking on the record.
"We did work with the services to discuss what projects might be deferred just for one year to enable us to reprogram that money and use it for the border and for other purposes as well," a senior defense official said.
The Pentagon is assuming the military funding holes left by shifting money to immigration and border missions now will be filled by the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" -- legislation still being debated in Congress that is designed to enact Trump's agenda.
The proposed funding in that bill is intended "to backfill those projects that were pushed out a little bit to make room for those emerging national security needs," the official said.
The Pentagon has already moved to gut $1 billion from the Army[3]'s budget to maintain its facilities, including living quarters for junior troops that for years have suffered from dilapidated conditions.
The raiding of Army facilities money sparked bipartisan ire on Capitol Hill, with lawmakers asking Army officials during a June budget hearing about the effects on soldiers' quality of life.
Gen. Randy George, the service's top officer, noted that in triaging budget priorities, something had to give. "Obviously, redirecting has an impact -- you have to make choices," he said.
In his previous term, Trump diverted $1 billion from an account that covers bonuses and other pay[4] for troops to fund 57 miles of border wall.
Meanwhile, roughly 10,000 U.S. troops, including Marines, have now surged to the southern border. That includes elements of the 4th Infantry Division equipped with Stryker[5] armored vehicles -- a deployment level that rivals, and in some cases exceeds, the number of American forces currently stationed in global combat zones.
While the U.S. military has maintained a border presence in various forms for decades, the latest ramp-up under Trump comes as the force is largely overstretched. During the previous administration, senior Pentagon leaders privately voiced concerns about the growing strain on units already juggling deployments across Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East.
In response to anti-immigration raid protests in California, the Trump administration has also deployed thousands of troops to LA. That new mission is being taken out of other existing accounts, too.
The estimated cost of the LA mission, which includes 4,000 federalized National Guard[6] troops and 700 Marines, is $134 million, Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell, the Pentagon's acting chief financial officer and comptroller, said at a congressional hearing earlier this month.
"The money will be pulled from the troops' existing operations and maintenance accounts," she said.
Defense officials said Thursday that the fiscal 2026 budget would offer junior troops at least $5 billion for barracks maintenance and construction, though they weren't immediately able to offer details of what that money would be spent on.
A senior Navy[7] official told reporters that the sea service planned on spending $4.2 billion on barracks maintenance and construction.
The Marine Corps[8] is slated to receive $2.9 billion of that total as part of the service's ambitious Barracks 2030 program, which has set out to improve unaccompanied housing for tens of thousands of Marines, to include civilian specialists to help manage the day-to-day workload.
Military.com reported in April that if that Capitol Hill did not appropriate enough funding for the Marine Corps' roughly $11 billion total improvement effort, Barracks 2030 could get pushed into the 2040s, long after many junior Marines could reap its benefits.
Eric Mason, the unaccompanied housing team lead for the service's installations arm, said then that "if, for some reason, God forbid, we don't get all the money we're asking for, then we have a backup plan, an alternate plan, which takes [us] out to about 2045, 2043, depending on how much we end up getting."
An Air Force official said the service is asking for $2.5 billion with a focus on building child development centers at Eglin, Travis Air Force Base[12] in California, and Tinker Air Force Base[13] in Oklahoma, as well as dormitories.
Specific details, such as why those funding amounts from each service add up to more than the announced $5 billion for barracks maintenance and construction, were not provided to Military.com.
Overall, Thursday's budget rollout represented an unprecedented move in what few specific details were provided to justify the "asks" from all the services. The $5 billion for the border mission -- and a notable amount of the Pentagon's 2026 budget overall -- is also tied to the success of the proposed Trump agenda bill, which is for now uncertain.
The White House has repeatedly advertised those funds as part of the Department of Defense's budget request. While it's being marketed as a $1 trillion budget, at least $113 billion is proposed in the unpassed reconciliation bill, meaning the amount is closer to around $848 billion -- roughly the same amount spent in the current fiscal year.
Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., told Military.com that Thursday's budget rollout is "the most disjointed and poorly executed budget release" he'd ever seen.
He described the administration's justification for its priorities as "an absolute failure."
"It's not clear that there is any strategy behind the numbers or if they even know what the numbers really are," Harrison told Military.com. "They seem to be relying on this mythical reconciliation bill that they didn't request and is not yet finalized to fill in gaps that they created."
And some services are actually seeing cuts in the new budget.
For example, in the Space Force[14], discretionary funding decreased from $29.4 billion to $26.3 billion. A White House official told Military.com that roughly $13.8 billion in related mandatory funding would actually make it an increase, but didn't specify the source of all the totals.
A day that was supposed to offer both lawmakers and the public new information to address reporting and questions about the effectiveness of the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities ended with little progress for the Trump administration.
A Thursday morning Pentagon press conference ordered by President Donald Trump quickly turned contentious, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spending much of his time berating the press over what he felt were poor choices in coverage. Reporting emerged earlier in the week that initial assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency found Trump's airstrikes on Iran had likely not eliminated its nuclear program and only set it back months.
Meanwhile, a closed-door classified briefing for senators on Capitol Hill ended with lawmakers saying it was still too early to know how badly Iran's nuclear program was damaged by U.S. strikes over the weekend, despite Trump's insistence that the U.S. bombs "obliterated" their targets.
The pair of briefings came as the Trump administration seeks to discredit the early intelligence assessment[2], which was starkly at odds with claims made immediately after the strikes by both Trump and Hegseth.
"The news conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable," Trump said in a social media post Wednesday, referring to the public Pentagon briefing.
However, the event began with the defense secretary taking nearly 10 minutes to lambaste the press for what Hegseth claimed was an anti-military bias before passing it off to Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman.
Caine then took another nearly 20 minutes to offer an argument for the mission's success that largely focused on the incredibly meticulous nature in which the bombs -- the Massive Ordnance Penetrators -- were designed specifically with the destruction of Iran's Fordo nuclear facility in mind.
Caine did not address the strikes at the other two locations of Natanz and Isfahan or the possibility that Iran had other locations or materials that could be used to continue weapons development.
The four-star general then told reporters that the mission was meticulously planned to put the bombs through the ventilation shafts at the Fordo facility and that, ultimately, the bombs "went exactly where they were intended to go."
Finally, Caine said that "we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function, and the pilot stated, quote, 'This was the brightest explosion that I've ever seen.'"
Still, neither Caine nor Hegseth were able to offer any direct evidence of the destruction at the Fordo facility. Trump ordered the strike on the facility -- a historic move against the U.S.' longtime foe in the region -- after Israel started a bombing campaign that triggered an Iranian retaliation.
Hegseth repeated his argument from Wednesday and told reporters that "if you want to know what's going on at Fordo, you better go there and get a big shovel, because no one's under there right now."
Caine argued that the "majority of the damage we assessed based on our extensive modeling" would have come from the bomb's blasts.
Experts were quick to note that that type of argument -- everything matched the models and plans -- is flawed.
"A strike can go 'precisely as planned' and still fail, if the model of the facility is wrong," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said on social media Thursday[3].
After briefing reporters, Hegseth and Caine, among others, then went to Capitol Hill and gave the full Senate a closed-door classified briefing.
While some of Trump's staunchest supporters in the Senate backed his claims that the facilities hit by U.S. forces were completely destroyed, even some Republicans emerged from the briefing tamping down that appraisal -- in the same breaths in which they praised the operation.
"I would just say the goals of the mission were accomplished," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told reporters. "I don't think anybody's been underground to assess the extent of the damage, so I don't know if anybody can give you a precise number" of how long Iran's nuclear program was set back.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., similarly told reporters that "whether it is a month or a year or some other period really depends on the final battle damage assessment, which has not been done."
By contrast, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ardent Trump supporter and Iran hawk, was adamant that Iran's nuclear program has been hampered for years.
"They blew these places up in a major league way," Graham said.
In the public briefing, Hegseth was quick to point to intelligence assessments from both the CIA[4] and the Director of National Intelligence[5] released Wednesday that cited "new intelligence" that the facilities in Iran were destroyed. Neither statement, however, offered any details about the new intelligence, and Hegseth wouldn't commit to making it public.
Yet when a reporter asked Hegseth whether he felt the public needed to see the intelligence being cited, he countered: "Do you have a top secret clearance, sir?"
Also left unanswered was whether the Trump administration was factoring in reports that Iran removed all of its enriched uranium from the targeted locations before the U.S. strikes.
Hegseth, when asked, said only that he was "not aware of any intelligence ... that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise."
Notably, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was not one of the briefers for the Senate session. In addition to Hegseth and Caine, senators heard from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
The same slate of officials is scheduled to brief the House on Friday morning, when they are likely to face similar skepticism and questions as they did from senators.
"I walk away from that briefing still under the belief that we have not obliterated the program," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Thursday. "The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated. It is certain that there is still significant capability and significant equipment that remain."
The Army[1] is preparing to overhaul its food service system in a move that could strip away government-run dining facilities and hand operations to private, for-profit companies.
Framed as a modernization effort, the plan could saddle enlisted soldiers, many of whom already struggle with low pay[2], with even greater costs for meals they are effectively required to buy.
So-called "campus-style dining" has been pitched to lawmakers as a way to incentivize private vendors to create Army dining spaces where soldiers want to eat, with longer hours, a better atmosphere, and additional menu variety.
But documents reviewed by Military.com show a system light on guardrails, nutrition standards and financial transparency -- and heavy on opportunities for contractors to upsell alcohol and high-priced extras to a population that has little choice to opt out.
So far, the Army still hasn't found a contractor to take up the deal. The deadline for contractors to make a pitch is Tuesday.
"[We] will leverage industry expertise and incentivize a contractor to operate a facility where soldiers want to dine, with better ambience, additional healthy food options, extended operating hours, and more," Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan, the acting head of Army Material Command, told lawmakers during an April hearing on the Defense Department's food operations.
The pilot program, currently open for bids, covers dining operations at five of the Army's largest installations: Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Carson[4], Colorado; Fort Stewart[5], Georgia; Fort Drum[6], New York; and Fort Cavazos[7], Texas.
Under the proposal, contractors would run the facilities, cover renovation costs up front, and be allowed to sell premium items such as higher-quality meal options, snacks and booze. They would also share the profits with the Army.
There are few restrictions on what vendors can sell, and they are exempt from following Army nutritional standards altogether, though the service itself also frequently skirts its own nutrition rules[8]. The Army has also waived compliance with the Berry Amendment, which requires the military to prioritize U.S.-made products or purchase through the Defense Logistics Agency, which governs oversight and logistics of food products for the Pentagon.
For many of the troops who would be affected, there is no real choice in the matter.
Junior enlisted service members who live in barracks are automatically charged a Basic Allowance for Subsistence, or BAS, amounting to roughly $460 per month. That money is deducted directly from their paychecks, regardless of how often they eat or what they consume, though the service has been largely unable to account for how that money is spent[9].
Under the privatized model, the deductions would continue, but soldiers may find themselves paying out of pocket for items not covered in the contractor's meal package under the "campus-style dining" initiative.
"It's important to stress this is a pilot program; we'll be assessing how this goes," Col. Junel Jeffrey, a service spokesperson, told Military.com. "Regular dining facilities are not being replaced."
Phrases such as "high-quality" and "fresh" are used frequently throughout the solicitation for contracts dictating what the Army expects from potential contractors, though the service never defines what those words actually mean.
The Defense Department has had mixed success with privatizing some of its major quality-of-life services, such as medical care, housing and military permanent change of station[10] moves.
It has looked to private companies to tackle some of the department's largest duties since the early 1990s, giving broader access to privately managed health care to family members and retirees, establishing the privatized military housing program to address shortfalls in family housing and, most recently, awarding a contract to a private joint partnership to run military moves.
For the most part, companies have invested heavily in their military contracts, providing services and benefits beyond what were offered by the Defense Department when it managed the programs.
But those efforts have not been without trouble and, in some cases, major scandals.
In 2018, the Reuters news organization uncovered shoddy construction and workmanship, poor service and inadequate maintenance that contributed to poor health and safety concerns[11] among military families in privatized housing.
A change in Tricare[12] contractors this year continues to affect military families, who have faced problems getting medical appointments[13] and maintaining their services with private health care providers in a new network managed by TriWest Healthcare Alliance.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said cancellation of the company's contract was "for cause due to HSA's demonstrated inability to fulfill their obligations and deliver high-quality moves to service members."
