In 1918 Uncle Leon Laquedem, born on this day 125 years ago, joined the United States Navy to fight in the Great War. Two months later Uncle Joe Laquedem joined the Marines. In that simpler time, the armed forces were run through the Department of War, though its functions were mainly ones of defense.
On June 8, 1949 George Orwell's prescient book 1984 was published. Orwell described a government in which the war department was named the Ministry of Peace, the commerce department was the Ministry of Plenty, and the department of official misinformation was named the Ministry of Truth. The sardonic names of the government departments in Orwell's dystopia are probably not why, two months later, the United States renamed the War Department the Department of Defense. Since then the Department of Defense has engaged in mostly war and very little defense. The hijackings of September 11, 2001, led by Saudi and Egyptian nationals, were the only serious foreign attack on United States territory since 1949, to which the Bush (43) administration responded by mounting a military operation (what we used to call "invading") against a nation that wasn't involved.
Our incoming president will be dealing with three United States wars (by Wikipedia's count) that started before his first term. Mr. Trump could atone for his past disrespect for the United States military by reducing our involvement in foreign wars, as for instance by stepping down our involvement in Syria and Yemen. It's unreasonable to expect that killing off the non-military citizens of other nations will make their survivors like us more.