The Pentagon is coping with a familiar poison concocted of raw confusion and simmering rage, all swirling around a piece of parchment signed with a flourish by a man who thrives on chaos.
In an act of profound historical revisionism, President Donald Trump has issued an executive order commanding the Leviathan of American power to shed its skin for cosmetic purposes.
The Department of Defense, a name enshrined in law by a sober post-war Congress in 1946, is to be consigned to the dustbin.
The institution headquartered at the Pentagon is to be reborn, by fiat, as the Department of War.
This is not merely a change of stationery. It is a declaration, a signal fire lit on the shores of a nervous world, and the smoke is spelling out a message of naked, unvarnished aggression.
The move, executed with a pen while bypassing the people’s representatives in Congress, is a direct assault on the very notion of civility in international affairs. It is a deliberate and calculated provocation.
And for what?
According to more than half a dozen current and former defense officials who have spoken on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional evisceration, the answer is as cynical as it is terrifyingly expensive.
This is political theater of the most expensive and dangerous kind, a multi-billion-dollar cosmetic surgery performed on the face of a nation that is bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.
The logistical nightmare is almost too vast to comprehend.
Officials are now staring down the barrel of a mandate to change the official seals on over 700,000 facilities spanning 40 countries and all 50 states.
We are talking about every last sheet of letterhead for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, and Coast Guard; the logos on every agency from the DIA to the DLA; the embroidered jackets of Senate-confirmed appointees; the embossed napkins in dining halls from Stuttgart to San Diego; right down to the cheap keychains and tchotchkes sold in the Pentagon gift shop.
This is a bonfire of vanity, and the American taxpayer will be forced to pour gasoline on it.
The sentiment within the ranks, from the E-ring offices to the motor pools, is one of outright frustration and a weary, bitter confusion.
Does Trump imagine America’s fighting forces have nothing better to do?
These are men and women tasked with the grave responsibility of managing the most destructive force in human history, and they are being ordered to worry about embroidery while the world fractures.
Their real challenges—a revanchist Russia, an ascendant and aggressive China, a new axis of authoritarian powers laughing at our self-absorbed pageantry—are being ignored for a cheap applause line at a rally.
One former defense official, who has spent a lifetime in the grim calculus of global power, put it in terms that were chillingly clear: “This is purely for domestic political audiences. Not only will this cost millions of dollars, it will have absolutely zero impact on Chinese or Russian calculations. Worse, it will be used by our enemies to portray the United States as warmongering and a threat to international stability.”
And that is the true genius of this madness.
In one stroke, the President has managed to alienate the professional military, defy Congress, waste unimaginable sums of money, and provide America’s adversaries with a perfect propaganda victory, all while polishing his own image as a strongman unafraid of the word “war.”
He has taken the subtle, complex doctrine of defense—a concept that includes deterrence, diplomacy, and alliance—and reduced it to a single, bloody syllable.
He is not building a stronger nation; he is crafting a darker myth.
The world is watching, hands moving closer to weapons, as the great republic proudly, defiantly, renames its central nervous system for conflict.
That is probably great comfort to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who Trump seems always eager to please.