By Dave Lindorff

From Aug. 7, 1789 when it was created, to September 18, 1947, the American people knew that their government had a Department of War, and that it had an Army and a Navy for that purpose, both to defend the country against attack, as it did in 1812, and to make war, as it did in the Barbary War of 1801-1805. Since then the US military has engaged in wars overe 80 times including in the Civil War. Most of those wars, whether against Native peoples as the expanding US sought their lands, or against Middleastern or Asian countries to gain access to their resources. 

But all tha time, the American people knew that their government was at war and that their tax money, whether they liked it or now, was being spent on efforts to kill or be killed, for defense and for offense. 

That changed in 1947, when a nation, exhausted by brutal world war that cost the US the lives of over 400,000 military personnel  and left over 600.000 seriously injured, wanted peace. The problem was the Truman administration, which had a monopoly on the atomic bomb, wanted to use it to enhance the US's pre-eminent power coming out of that global conflict that had battered and weakened all the other world powers. So even as the US began in 1946 cranking out more atomic bombs as rapidly as it could, creating close to 400 Nagasaki-sized bombs by 1950, and with the intent to use them, in 1947 President Truman had the Department of War name changed to the Department of Defense.  

Housed in the world's largest building, the Pentagon, constructed during World War II to house the giant bureaucracy of war that was contemplated even as the war was being fought, the Department of Defense was never about "defense,"  for since the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945, no nation has had the capacity to attack the US with any chance of surviving such an action.