Old joke from when I was in engineering college.

What’s the difference between a electrical engineer and a civil engineer?

One builds the bombs one builds the targets.

Well I mean yeah. “Defense” just sounds better on TV.

The attack industry

Defense does also do defense in a lot of cases

It’s a fairly recent development. It was created as the department of war by Washington and remained that until 1947 where it split into the departments of the air force and army, joining the already existing department of the navy, which together made up the national military establishment (NME), which was renamed 2 years later to the DOD.

“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”

• President Muffley, in Dr Strangelove

• Military-industrial complex
• War machine
• Merchants of death

There are many names.

The US used to have the Department of War. Then it split up after WWII into the departments of the army, navy, air force and the overseeing department was renamed the department of defense. Probably a branding thing.

edit: a word

“The Ministry of Peace”

-Orwell

WWII was the war to end all wars, so we couldn’t have a department of war anymore. Still “needed” and army , navy, marines and all the weapons for them though so we created the department of defense.

I’ve always heard to it referred to as the “military industrial complex”. Eisenhower tried to warn us about it in the 1950s.

For countries like Finland, the Ministry of Defense is not about offense, and is very heavily armed.

They also cause Famines, Plagues, and Pestilence. They have whole departments devoted to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

They’re not a one trick pony.

Protecting your own country doesn’t always involve actively declaring war with everyone. Often it’s economic or cyber infrastructure hardening related

It was the department of war but the government decided that that name was too honest, makes the corpos look bad too