University of Kwazulu-Natal

How Trump S 2025 War Agenda Rewired The Pentagon

Bonisiwe Shabane
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how trump s 2025 war agenda rewired the pentagon

America is at war on the border. The Pentagon again calls itself the Department of War. Fentanyl is treated like sarin. Veterans sleep in tents while a promised mega-campus waits to be built in Los Angeles. President Donald Trump spent 2025 rewriting the country’s rules of war. Orders out of Washington put troops on the southern border under an invasion mission.

They revived the Department of War name at the Pentagon, treated fentanyl like a battlefield weapon, pushed U.S. Space Force toward combat in orbit, and have promised 6,000 beds for homeless veterans in Los Angeles. The shift reaches from the Rio Grande to the moon, pulling the military deeper into border security, drug policy, space and homelessness as Trump has navigated from campaign rhetoric to a more stringent national... Trump’s 2025 agenda didn’t just change policy; it redrew the map for how the administration defines threats. Synthetic opioids, homelessness, migration and lunar exploration now sit inside the same national security conversation as carrier groups and missile defense, reframing domestic issues as potential fronts in broader conflict. Congress has not passed legislation reversing or codifying the Department of War renaming or related directives.

Committees in both the House and Senate requested 2026 briefings on border deployments, fentanyl policy, lunar infrastructure, and use of Title 10 powers in nontraditional missions. The upcoming year will test whether the directives become durable doctrine through budgets and case law, or remain executive experiments vulnerable to judicial review or political reversal. Supporters said the new objectives delivered clarity about how the administration plans to project strength. Critics, however, have argued that the "war" framing blurs legal lines on domestic deployments and centralizes military power in crises historically handled by civilian agencies. Amanda Becker, The 19th Amanda Becker, The 19th Orion Rummler, The 19th Orion Rummler, The 19th

Mariel Padilla, The 19th Mariel Padilla, The 19th This story was originally published by The 19th. In the months leading up to his election, President Donald Trump insisted that he had nothing to do with the far-right vision for his second administration known as Project 2025, a Christian-nationalist blueprint to... As the year draws to a close, a crowd-sourced effort, as well as trackers from advocacy organizations and labor unions, show that his administration has implemented roughly half of the goals laid out in... On September 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Pentagon the Department of War. In strictly legal terms, the order required congressional approval and carried no operational implications for the military chain of command.

But the symbolism was immense. For the first time since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the United States abandoned the vocabulary of “defense” in favor of “war.” The White House insisted the change was meant to highlight “peace through strength.” Yet for many in Washington and abroad, it marked a rupture with the principles of collective security and restraint that underpinned... The renaming crystallized a deeper transformation in American foreign policy under Trump’s second term: the retreat from alliances, the embrace of unilateral coercion, and the erosion of trust among partners. The question now facing strategists and historians alike is whether this represents a passing deviation—or the definitive unraveling of the postwar order. Words matter.

The Department of War was the institutional pillar of U.S. military power until 1947, when the Truman administration created the Department of Defense. That change was more than semantic: it reflected America’s new commitment to collective defense, expressed in NATO, ANZUS, bilateral pacts in Asia, and the UN Charter’s prohibition on aggressive war. By reviving the term “War,” Trump evoked an earlier America—more isolationist, more transactional—when neutrality acts and domestic politics kept the country aloof from global responsibilities. Allies interpreted the move as more than branding. It signaled a turn away from the architecture of collective defense and toward a doctrine of coercive unilateralism.

Since 1945, U.S. leaders from Truman to Reagan defined American credibility by the reliability of its commitments. Trump’s renaming suggested a reversal: foreign policy as transactional bargaining rather than enduring partnership. The following is the Dec. 18, 2025, Congressional Research Service in focus report, National Defense Strategy: Potential Implications for DOD of Prioritizing the Western Hemisphere and China. The 2025 U.S.

National Security Strategy (NSS) outlines the second Trump Administration’s aim to shift how U.S. foreign policy prioritizes different regions of the world. The shift in regional priorities outlined in the document could lead to changes in U.S. defense strategy, plans, programs, and operations. Such changes could affect, among other things, the locations and numbers of U.S. forces; the locations of military facilities; the types and quantities of weapons and equipment the military develops and acquires; and the alliances and partnerships that support U.S.

basing and overflight, defense production, and integrated training. Congress may act to support, reject, or modify this prioritization through legislation (including appropriations) and oversight. The 2025 NSS and past NSSs have named the U.S. sovereignty, safety, and prosperity as a priority, but have outlined different paths to securing it. The Biden and first Trump Administrations’ strategies of 2022 and 2017, respectively, emphasized great power competition with China and Russia. The 2025 NSS, by comparison, includes a focus on defending the U.S.

homeland by “reassert[ing] and enforc[ing] the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” and competing with China economically and militarily in the Indo-Pacific region. Defense of the U.S. homeland, the 2025 NSS states, includes countering mass migration, drug trafficking, and foreign incursion in the region, and defending against complex aerial threats with the Golden Dome for America missile defense system. Compared with the 2017 and 2022 NSSs, the 2025 NSS places less emphasis on competition with Russia, potential Russian threats to European security, or competition with China and Russia in the Middle East and... The 2025 NSS calls on the military to “[readjust] our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” “[deter] a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch” with China, and “[enable]... Military leaders have raised serious concerns about the Trump administration’s forthcoming defense strategy, exposing a divide between the Pentagon’s political and uniformed leadership as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summons top brass to a highly...

Last updated 3 weeks ago. Our resources are updated regularly but please keep in mind that links, programs, policies, and contact information do change. The White House has released a document that dismantles the post-Cold War consensus on American foreign policy. The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), signed by President Donald J. Trump during the first year of his second term, re-imagines the United States’ role in the world. For decades, American strategy was predicated on the idea of global leadership through alliance networks, trade integration, and the promotion of democratic values.

The 2025 NSS replaces this with a doctrine of “Civilizational Realism” and “Hard Sovereignty.” It posits that the American Republic is under siege, not just from foreign adversaries like China, but from “internal subversion” and a crisis of cultural identity.

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