Naming and mission
In a 2011 episode, Bob Zadek told caller Colleen that when the country was founded there was a cabinet post called the Department of War, and that in 1947, during the Truman administration, it became the Department of Defense. Zadek said that today it has become, by its activities, a Department of War again, and that if all the country did was defend, everyone would be a lot better off. Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011)
Zadek repeated the point in a later 2011 episode, telling Nick Gillespie that the federal department was originally called the Department of War and that in 1947 it changed its name with consolidation to the Department of Defense. In Zadek’s account, the mission remained a Department of War and only the name changed; the country was conducting offensive, not defensive, wars. Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011)
In a 2012 episode, Zadek put the same framing to Gary Johnson, saying that in his view the Department of Defense had regressed back to its old title of Department of War. Johnson agreed that the operative word is defense, not offense, and not the Department of War, which in his opinion is what it has become. The Triumph of Principle Over Politics (2012)
Christopher Preble, in a 2019 episode, gave the change a statutory setting: after World War II the country created the National Security Act of 1947, which among other things created an Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, and critically redefined the Department of War to the Department of Defense. Before that, he said, there was a Department of War and a Department of the Navy. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Spending and threats
Gary Johnson told Zadek in 2011 that the country was spending more on Defense—a word he said was really not Defense but War—than all the other countries in the world combined, while being 5% of the world’s population. He said that a 43% cut in Defense spending would still leave the United States outspending China by triple what China was then spending, and that there was not a significant threat to our security. He named Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya as places where he did not see the criteria of threats against the United States satisfied. Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011)
Nick Gillespie, in the same year, said defense spending since 2000 had essentially doubled. He cited roughly $400 billion a year on defense in 2000 in current dollars and closer to $800 billion at the time of the interview, with Obama on a path toward closer to a trillion dollars over a decade, and said the country was in at least three elective wars with no clear endpoint and no clear objective. Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011)
Johnson returned to the figure in 2012, promising a balanced budget submitted to Congress in 2013 that would include a 43% reduction in military spending. He said the United States was spending 52 cents of every dollar spent on military spending worldwide while being 5% of the world’s population, and that military alliances were key to reducing military spending by 43% and having the rest of the world take up the slack. He distinguished foreign aid, which he opposed, from military alliances. The Triumph of Principle Over Politics (2012)
Congressional abdication and perpetual war
Zadek, in a 2014 episode, described an older arrangement in which war was a formal act: a President perceiving a need to go to war would go to Congress and seek congressional approval, and could not commit forces without it. That, he said, has eroded, so that the army has become the private police force of the President, who can call out the cops whenever the President wishes, and Congress has ceded that responsibility. The result, in his account, is a state of perpetual war, with middle-aged Americans who have never lived during a period without war. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Preble, in 2019, offered a parallel explanation for how the country evolved from one he described as genetically opposed to war to one permanently at war. He said it is relatively easy for the United States to wage war because it has a large military deployed in many places and staffed by professionals, whereas in the past the country had to raise a military to do it. Because the President now has that military at his disposal, Preble said, the President uses it and then dares Congress to cut off the funds, which almost never happened. He also said that after World War II defense was redefined as defending an idea forward, mostly in Europe and Asia, rather than primarily defending the United States and the approaches to the United States at sea. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Preble added that the Constitution makes it hard to do things, requiring a large public groundswell and alignment of all the branches, and that war by contrast is the easiest of all things the President can do. He said there is no debate about foreign policy and especially about the use of force precisely for that reason, because for most people it does not seem worth debating. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Across episodes
The naming argument recurs in four episodes across eight years. Zadek states it in 2011 to Colleen and to Nick Gillespie, puts it to Gary Johnson in 2012, and Preble supplies the statutory detail of the National Security Act of 1947 in 2019; the later treatment adds the mechanism of presidential discretion and congressional abdication that the earlier exchanges assert only as a conclusion. Johnson supplies the spending figures in 2011 and 2012, Gillespie supplies the 2000-to-2011 doubling in 2011, and Preble supplies the ease-of-war explanation in 2019.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give the founding date of the Department of War, the name of any statute beyond the National Security Act of 1947, or the text of any bill. They do not state what any court has held about war powers or which amendment or clause a war-powers case turned on. They do not identify the congressional authorization that Gillespie says Libya lacked, and they do not give the outcome of any vote on war funding.