It always sounds to me like a literal awkward translation from German.
Nailed it. Yes, it’s been around for a while, but any perceived increase in its usage is absolutely intended to remind the public that the military’s primary purpose is fighting wars and any legislation or policies aimed at the military that are contrary to that end should be eradicated.
Well, it does sound better than this…
For some reason, this was a big headline in the San Antonio Express-News today. I understand Pete floated this idea a while ago.
Pete Hegseth wants a new name for Defense Department: War Department. Why it matters.
After World Wars I and II, war got a bad name. U.S. leaders recast military might as a deterrent, a way to prevent war. Hegseth thinks that went too far. He wants to re-emphasize ‘lethality.’
Yeah, let’s make war deadly again.
…
In at least one respect, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to turn the calendar back to that time. The nation’s military forces were organized under the War Department, and Hegseth believes that term, with its bold martial overtones, better suits his desire to remake the armed services to emphasize fighting and killing.The Trump administration has yet to formally propose renaming the Defense Department. But students of the military say Hegseth’s talk about doing so should not be taken lightly. They say it could signal a desire to free combat forces from legal restraints meant to protect civilians — rules of war Hegseth has derided as fussy, burdensome and dangerous to American soldiers.
…
Bye-bye Geneva Conventions.*
…
The idea of substituting “War Department” for “Defense Department” ties in with Hegseth’s own agenda as well. The defense secretary maintains the armed forces lost their edge under President Joe Biden, privileged diversity above competence and strayed from what he argues should by their overriding focus: “lethality.”
…
That’s it. No more John Wayne movies for him.
*I’ve heard (especially younger) people say Geneva Convention (singular), as if they are referring to a meeting, like a political convention. There was a convention and what came out of it were The Geneva ConventionS (plural).
The 1949 Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols are international treaties that contain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war. They protect people who do not take part in the fighting (civilians, medics, aid workers) and those who can no longer fight (wounded, sick and shipwrecked troops, prisoners of war).
Source: The Geneva Conventions and their Commentaries | ICRC
Bumping this as I was reminded of the term in this thread and had some additional thoughts that seemed too far afield from the FQ topic.
Totally agree with this sentiment. What the current SecDef and POTUS are missing with their use of the term “warfighters” and worse, with the renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, is that the first purpose of a strong standing military force is not actually to fight wars. It is to deter wars.
If you actually have to fight a war, then you’ve failed in that first purpose.
But our current leadership misses this point entirely. Heaven help us, Trump reportedly misses this point with our nuclear forces as well. Forces whose sole purpose is to deter our adversaries, and which, if ever used, could lead to the deaths of billions of people and the end of civilization. Cite (gift link).
Not to mention the administrations complete dismantling of America’s soft power. First by cutting USAID, and then by shutting down anything in the military that is in any way related to gaining the support of the native populations in theaters of action. The assumption being that the only tool we need in our tool box is a gun. In terms of fighting waste and abuse someone should tell him that bags of rice are a hell of a lot cheaper than stinger missiles.
A rice farmer never wrote a million dollar check to a GOP political action committee.
Insert Uncle Ben joke here.
I hate to even tangentialy defend the current criminal regime and its wannabe tyrant.
But “warfighter” as a DoD term of art dates from the mid 1980s. I got out in 1988 and I was already a “warfighter” by then. But just barely; it really hit its stride a few years later.
And also by making it clear that the US has no need for friends and allies.
Also, Jeff Tiedrich’s fave, “Kegstand”.
I was in the process of pointing out that this had already been acknowledged and generally accepted by the posters on the thread, but that Hegseth for whatever reason decided to start using in when talking to the public, when I noticed that the person who first pointed it out was you on post 2.
When I was a Vietnam-era kid and the threat of a draft loomed, I took some solace in my understanding that most of the personnel in the Army were support for those on the front lines, shooting at the enemy, with a ratio of about 10:1.
Does “warfighter” mean only the 1, or is it everyone? Is that ratio accurate?
I decided to look it up, and I found a web site for “Air University Library”, which claims to be “the premier library in the Department of Defense”. It’s located at the Air War College in Mongomery, Alabama.
It says:
The term “warfighter” is a relatively modern term that has gained prominence in military terminology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is often used to describe service members who are directly engaged in combat and military operations.
But I’m not sure what “directly engaged” means; does that mean you are on the front lines, or does that include people directly supporting those people? Because that could be considered a person who is “directly engaged”.
It gets even more confusing where it talks about being an “adaptive warfighter”, and further implies (at least to me) that it’s a catch-all term for members of the military. Specifically this part:
The ability to perform a wide range of tasks and roles as needed, including those outside of one’s primary specialization.
A “wide range of tasks and roles” sounds like more than “shooting people and dropping bombs on them”.
Other places where I see it defined, such as dictionaries, consider it to be a synonym for “military service member”, particularly in the US.
pre-trump it depended on context.
Often it meant everyone in the military and was meant by the brass to remind the non-combatant servicemembers that what the combat folks were doing was deadly serious work and you’d better take your job just as seriously because their lives depend on your bureaucracy.
Other times it was used just to mean the actual combat folks. With uses like “The needs of the warfighters come first. We must field this new weapon for them, not give pay raises to all.”
In the trump era who knows what any word means? Or whether it has any consistent meaning from one incompetent bigwig to another, or from one utterance to the next?
Why stop at “Warfighter?” Let’s designate everyone attached to our glorious new Department of War as “WarWinners!”
This is not to say America has ever lost a war. We need that historical fact to remain: in solid tandem with the fact that all lost wars were the Democrats’.
Whenever people tell me they vote R because they’re strong on defense, I like to tell them “the last Republican to win a war was Lincoln”. It’s not strictly true, but they’re invariably too ignorant to argue the point.
If we keep treating the rest of the world like a rented mule (sorry for the imagery), we will need a department of DEFENSE not a department of War.
We were not often loved, but we had allies. Now, thanks to Donnie, everyone hates us. Half of the USA hates us.
I went to a conference on electronics, run by the military, in 2007 and 2008, and the term was used there, and didn’t seem new to anyone (though it was new to me.) Seems a bit more honest than most of the terms used.
Mr. McKinley did a good job, though, as in Mr. Dooley’s famous book review, “Tiddy” Roosevelt won the Spanish American war mostly by himself.