ARLINGTON, Va. — The Department of War said Monday that it had completed its inventory of the roughly 7,600 places in federal law where the word “defense” must be replaced, and that it had begun the second phase of its renaming effort, which officials said would remove the word from the rest of the country, starting with fences.
A September 2025 executive order authorized “Department of War” as a secondary title for the Department of Defense, but only Congress can formally rename a federal department. In April, the Pentagon sent lawmakers a legislative proposal estimating the cost of the change at about $52 million and requiring approximately 7,600 changes to federal law. Late Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee voted 29-27 to add the name change to the annual defense authorization bill.
“Seventy-six hundred is a start. But ‘defense’ is everywhere,” said Brock Venner, the department’s deputy assistant secretary of war for nomenclature, lethality, and morale. “It’s in the dictionary. It’s in basketball. It’s in the backyard, hiding inside a word. A fence is a defense that lost its first syllable. We’re giving it a better one.”
Under a 212-page Phase Two memorandum released Monday, every residential fence in the country is to be reclassified as an “offence,” with picket fences becoming “picket offences” and chain-link fences becoming “chain-link offences.” Fence posts are to be promoted to “offence posts” with no change in pay. Survey teams have relabeled 41,000 fences in Northern Virginia since Friday, and the department reported that three of them have since advanced on neighboring yards by as much as 11 inches overnight, a development Venner described as “lethality returning to the American lawn.” A cedar privacy fence in Fairfax County has taken a birdbath.
The memorandum also directs high school basketball crowds to replace the chant “De-fense” with “War,” followed by two claps and a second “War.” Defense attorneys are to be known as “war attorneys,” a change the department said it expects to make courtrooms “more honest about what’s going on in there.” The word “defenseless” has been provisionally replaced with “warless,” which officials acknowledged sounds like the opposite of what they meant and is under review.
Harold Penmarch, chief registrar of the Continental Nomenclature Office, said his staff had processed department renamings before but never one that extended to building materials. “Renaming a department is routine. You change the sign, you change the letterhead,” Penmarch said. “Renaming the thing that keeps a neighbor’s dog out of your tomatoes is new for us. We have opened a file. The file is also being renamed.”
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, noted that the country maintained a Department of War from 1789 until the late 1940s, and said the scholarship shows that fences of that era were already understood to be aggressive. “The colonial fence did not keep things out. It went and got things,” Achterberg said. “We softened it. The scholarship on this is clear, because I have written all of it.”
Venner said the department had also submitted a formal request that the letter W be moved ahead of the letter D in the alphabet, “where it has always belonged in spirit,” and that it expected a response from the alphabet by fall.