Reviving the Department of War, as demanded by President Donald Trump, could bring a bluntness and clarity that is rare in government bureaucratese. Like it or not, war is the true and lethal purpose of what’s now called the Department of Defense. Sugarcoating it with the more acceptable term “defense” does nothing for a public still sick of foreign wars after the horrors soldiers endured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, was a highly decorated Army Air Corps pilot during World War II. As a critic of the Cold War, and of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, he wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 2011 that with the renaming of the War Department to the DOD in 1947 the military “became sacred, virtually untouchable. How could anyone vote to cut defense unless he or she is willing to face political defeat?”

It's still a relevant point — if not one that Trump is likely to embrace, since he likes to boast of his administration’s record-level........

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