In a shift that defied 20 years of precedent, the US Department of Defense has changed the mission statement on its website. Instead of using its 2 million staff members to “deter war,” as Mother Jones noted, it now wants to use “lethal force”.
If the Pentagon had identified itself previously as “a means to provide military forces to deter war and protect the security of the country”, it has currently changed to “the provision of US lethal force to protect the country’s security and maintain American influence abroad”.
The edit to the US military doctrine was made on the sly, while the text of the national defence strategy 2018, of the United States has remained unchanged on the DOD’s “About Us” page. It was first noticed by military affairs site Task and Purpose.
The Pentagon’s official website, currently at defense.gov and previously at defenselink.mil, aimed at detering war. The change happened sometime between January 2 and January 3 of this year.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Robert Manning did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Dana White. Pentagon spokeswoman White was asked why the mission had changed and who would have approved it. She was also questioned about the reasoning behind the decision to remove “deter war” and add “sustain American influence abroad”. She did not respond to the questions.
NEW: Trump’s Pentagon quietly made a change to the stated mission it's had for two decades https://t.co/pCMtunVL1n pic.twitter.com/RGTAX050dc
— Task & Purpose (@TaskandPurpose) June 29, 2018
The United States has been at war for at least the past 16 years — and that does not include its involvement in protracted, undeclared conflicts. US troops are stationed in some 100 countries, with the Pentagon in recent months freely acknowledging its use of so-called “proactive conflict” as strategy for regime change, according to US military officials who have rewritten the military’s Law of War Manual.
Pentagon chief James Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general, has repeatedly prioritized the need to “build a more lethal force” in public statements and planning documents. During a House Armed Services Committee hearing in February, Mattis said, “Everything we do must contribute to the lethality of our military. The paradox of war is that an enemy will attack a perceived weakness, so we cannot adopt a single, preclusive form of warfare. Rather, we must be able to fight across the spectrum of combat.”
“The nation must field sufficient, capable forces to deter conflict,” he added. “If deterrence fails, we must win.”
At least seven previous defense secretaries served under the website’s old mission statement. It seems as if Mattis has made a lasting impression on his office. Besides overseeing this seemingly subtle word change, Mattis wrote an all-hands memorandum in October 2017 stating, “we are a Department of war”.
His choice of words goes back to the DoD’s name prior to 1949.