alt Hacker NewsThere is no "DoW". Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, are named by Congress. Just because the current administration wants to use a different name means nothing ... unless everyone just complies in advance. Will Congress actually rename it? Hard to say, but it doesn't seem very likely.
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Getting off-topic here but it was irritating that Anthropic's original announcement called them the Department of War. What was that even signaling?
This is such a silly point to argue over. From 1789-1947 we had a "Department of War", which then merged into "Department of Army" under the newly formed (in 1947) National Military Establishment (NME) which was changed in 1949 to "Department of Defense" because N-M-E sound like "enemy".
It's not like these names are part of some sacred part of American identity, and "defense" has always been laughable as a euphemism. The DoD refers to themselves as the DoW [0] now, so it's completely reasonably to refer to the department as DoW. And of all the places to put your political energy, defending a laughable euphemism of a name that was used because the previous iteration of the name sounded funny seems like a sub-optimal use of that a energy.
> There is no "DoW".
There’s no Obamacare either. Come on, this is about as pedantic as the “the DoD is not the Pentagon” debate downthread.
It’s a colloquial name, and how the executive branch wants everyone to refer to it. This forum isn’t an official document. Move on.
"Defense" is a harmful euphemism that misleads the American public, so in this case I'm happy to humor the admins decision.