"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.

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.

"The Ministry of Peace"

-Orwell

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

Defense does also do defense in a lot of cases

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.

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.

Yeah ... no.

Ask Europeans if they feel working in that industry right now feels like anything but for defensive reasons.

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

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

funny how the israeli military is called a "defense force". haven't been doing much defending.

The attack industry

Regardless of what you call it, making the production of weapons an 'industry' is psychotic.

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

It is a war industry for the Western countries because the war is never on their soil. It is a defence industry for everyone else.

Someone who works in said US defense industry here

Neither defense nor war really apply to what we do, but between the two defense is the more apt description. The DoD largely uses a strategy of deterrence, where the technology we develop and training done for the "war fighter" is just public and visible enough that no other major country wants to take the risk of going into full open conflict with the US. Since most efforts go into deterrence, and deterrence is a defense strategy, it does become the more appropriate word.

Sure the US loves its proxy wars, but those don't throw the entire nation into wartime. Plus, in a round about way proxy wars help with the deterrence since we get an outlet for the decades old stock piles of arms that we no longer want and want to replace with the new stuff. If our waste products are being useful in places like Ukraine, it helps build up an idea of what it is we keep for ourselves, again building up a deterrence of openly and directly attacking the US