Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

You refer to the Pentagon, as is usually done, as a defense organization. In 1947, when the National Defense Act was passed, the former War Department — the American department concerned with war which up to that time was honestly called the War Department — had its name changed to the Defense Department. I was a student then and didn’t think I was very sophisticated, but I knew and everyone knew that this meant that to whatever extent the American military had been involved in defense in the past — and partially it had been so — this was now over: since it was being called the Defense Department, that meant it was going to be a department of aggression, nothing else.