James, you know better than that…( unlike many here, you usually don’t go for cheap laughs to make the U.S. look bad…:D)

History lesson time… (did I sound like Mr. Chips?)

The title was Sercetary of War (whether there was a war or not) until September, 1948. The person is appointed by the President and sits in the President’s cabinet and is the civil leader of the military…

Why the shift to “Defense” rather than “War”?

The War Department was in charge of the Army (including the US Army Air Force, though after the 1942 re-org it was already virtually an independent service from the Army Ground Forces). Prior to 1947 there was a co-equal Navy Department with its own cabinet secretary, also responsible for the US Marine Corps. The 1947 reorg renamed ‘War’, ‘Army’ and folded it, the Navy Dept and a new AF Dept together under one cabinet secretary as Dept of Defense. ‘Euphemism’* can be suggested as reason for the particular name ‘Defense’, but naming the whole thing ‘War’ would have implied the Army ran things, according to previous US terminology, if ‘names are important’.

*one man’s ‘euphemism’ might be another man’s setting out of a principal against which a society or organization can be judged. If you pursue wars that aren’t legitimately defensive (of yourself or others), you’ve broken the standard you set in declaring ‘defense’ as the military’s purpose. The intellectual change in the West, picking up serious steam after WWI, was concept that aggrandizing war (or conquest/colonialism in the now ‘third world’) wasn’t OK. Before that, it wasn’t even agreed it wasn’t OK. That’s progress, to take a ‘glass half full’ point of view. Although, it obviously doesn’t mean all wars since then by everyone calling their military ‘defense forces’ have all been justified, so that’s potential hyprocisy that wasn’t there before, to take the glass half empty view.

Joe