,A new survey has found that three-quarters of American voters are likely to ignore Pete Hegseth’s decision to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War.”
Among the respondents to YouGov’s latest polling, 72 percent said they were more likely to continue to refer to the Pentagon as the Department of Defense than adopt the secretary’s preferred name, with just 18 percent saying they would observe his preference.
There was an interesting partisan breakdown within those answers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 90 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Independents preferred the previous name, but, more unexpectedly, a majority of Republicans, 55 percent, agreed with them. A mere 45 percent said they liked the sound of the Department of War.
The research also found that men were more likely to use the new name than women, although the usage figures were still low among both demographics: 26 percent of men approved of Hegseth’s rebranding compared to 12 percent of women.
The agency was known as the Department of War for 158 years, from August 1789 until September 1947. During this time, the decision was made to switch to a less aggressive name in the wake of the Second World War, when the Allies had just secured global peace after six years of violent struggle.
In addition to renaming his department, the former Fox News weekend host has expressed a marked preference for referring to U.S. soldiers as “warfighters” and recently delivered a detailed address to the military’s top generals and admirals at Quantico, Virginia, laying out his thoughts on the “warrior ethos” he expected them to observe.
Hegseth used the occasion to express a deep dislike of unfit personnel and those whose personal appearance did not meet his standards of personal grooming. He banned beards and long hair from the ranks and also moved to explain his plan for purging the Armed Forces of “woke” values and “DEI” appointees.
The YouGov poll was conducted in response to Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s speeches at Quantico, with a majority of respondents saying they disapproved of the decision to order the officers to attend in person and that they considered it both a potential national security risk and a poor use of taxpayers’ money, given that travel costs for ensuring their attendance were priced at more than $1 million.
A majority also expressed concern about Hegseth firing military leaders on political grounds and disagreed that there was a need for U.S. troops to enter American cities to bolster law enforcement, despite Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric on the subject of urban crime this summer.
More positively for the secretary, the voters polled did agree with him that soldiers’ physical fitness was of paramount importance.
