The Fight Over Renaming Military Posts, Explained

Why are Republican presidential candidates calling for Confederate names to be reinstated?

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A sign after a ceremony renaming Fort Bragg as Fort Liberty, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, on June 2, 2023. (Photo by ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)

Earlier this month Fort Bragg, the largest military post in the country, became Fort Liberty. While campaigning in North Carolina, where the base is located, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared that as president he would restore the old name. During his own visit to the Tar Heel state, former Vice President Mike Pence also announced that he supported a reversal. Both candidates said their stance was based on opposition to “political correctness.”

Why were the names changed to begin with, and why is there backlash brewing now? Would the next president even have the power to reverse the change? 

The process.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the racial unrest that followed, protesters around the country took to the streets to vandalize monuments and statues commemorating Confederate soldiers. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced an amendment to the annual defense spending bill that would rename military assets that honored the Confederacy, she described the amendment as “one step toward addressing systemic racism.” 

The proposed amendment became law in early 2021 when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. The bill included a provision requiring the secretary of defense to establish a commission renaming posts named after Confederate figures. (Its official title: the “Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.”) Then-President Trump opposed the provision and rejected the bill, but Congress easily overrode his veto.

The bipartisan commission was tasked with developing criteria to identify Confederate-related Department of Defense assets, as well as standards and procedures for renaming them. The eight commissioners focused on recommending new names for nine Army bases, and issued a report advising Congress on how to manage other assets with Confederate names.

In their report recommending new names for the bases, the commission explained that in choosing the names of Southern bases established during World War I and II, the Army based most of its decisions on the preference of local leaders, who advocated for the Confederate generals they revered: “These names and memorials have far more to do with the culture under which they were named than they have with any historical acts actually committed by their namesakes.”

The commission similarly deferred to local sensitivities when choosing new individuals to commemorate. After receiving some 34,000 suggestions, the commission selected new names for different installations. With the exception of Fort Liberty, the names honor individuals who served the United States in times of conflict and “reflect the values and virtues” of the U.S. military.

Seven of the nine bases have already been renamed. Fort Bragg—the most well-known of the nine, named for notoriously unpopular and incompetent Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg—officially became Fort Liberty on June 2. Others were renamed after prominent African-American soldiers. Georgia’s Fort Gordon will become Fort Eisenhower later this year.

Last year the commission estimated the cost to rename the Army posts at $21 million and the remaining Department of Defense assets at $41.5 million, for a total cost of $62.5 million. Yet Ty Seidule, vice chair of the commission and a history professor at Hamilton College, tells The Dispatch that the final costs won’t be known until the process is finished. Water towers are particularly expensive to deal with, according to Seidule.

The politics.

“I also look forward to, as president, restoring the name of Fort Bragg,” DeSantis said at the North Carolina Republican Party convention earlier this month. “It’s an iconic name and an iconic base, and we’re not going to let political correctness run amok in North Carolina.”

Local media reported “raucous cheers from the crowd” when DeSantis made the vow. But is it a popular position outside of the GOP base in a Southern state?

There hasn’t been much polling recently, though surveys from 2020 show the issue as divisive. Almost half of voters supported renaming military bases named for Confederates, according to a 2020 poll by Quinnipiac University. A small majority supported removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the country. A 2020 Military Times poll found that almost half of service members supported changing the names of military bases, and almost 70 percent believed that Confederate flags and symbols should be banned from public spaces on base.

The limits of presidential power.

Even if Pence or DeSantis were to become president, they would face an uphill battle in getting the old names reinstated. They lack the power to act unilaterally, and Congress isn’t eager to reverse course.

The NDAA for fiscal year 2020 bans the Department of Defense from naming new assets, or renaming existing ones, after Confederate figures. Given the strength of the majorities in both houses in overriding Trump’s veto of the 2021 NDAA—81-13 in the Senate and 322-87 in the House—it is unlikely that future Congresses would have the support needed to change the law.

“Congress created the Naming Commission to be bipartisan in nature for a reason,” a former Democratic congressional staffer tells the Dispatch. “Members across the aisle are invested in the permanence of those changes, and I don’t see future Congresses changing the law again so that we can rename military installations after folks who actively fought against the United States.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    This is an incredibly stupid idea

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  2. Ihfraser

    On the “almost nobody ever knows who these bases were named after, so why bother to change” argument.

    The first point is that the officials who named these bases were, at the time, powerfully aware of who these people were, The symbolism of the name choice was entirely intentional. These facilities are all located in the States of the former Confederacy or in border areas that sympathized with the rebellion. They were named in the Jim Crow era, when the U.S. Army followed a policy of segregation. In at least one case, a southern base named after a Union general (A.A. Humphreys) was renamed for the ante bellum plantation that had once occupied the site.
    The naming of these bases was a political act, deliberately taken to show public support by the U.S. Army for policies and practices that the United States not only no longer supports, but considers to be antithetical to its fundamental values.

    The second point is that it really doesn’t matter what percentage of the population knows the history of the person after whom the base is named. The government that is responsible for naming the facility does know, and the name attached to a government facility is a government action that honours the person the facility is named after.
    A nation’s military forces should not honour those who treasonously took up arms against it, especially if the war in which they fought had as its principle objective the maintenance of human slavery.
    I suggest that this proposition is true even if those people were otherwise personally admirable (which isn’t always so clear here). Quite properly, the British Army doesn’t have a base named after George Washington.

    The third point is related to the second.
    Let us suppose that the United States had bases named: Fort Bales, Fort Calley, Fort Laval, Fort Stroop, and Fort Turner.
    Would it matter that only a few Americans might wonder if Fort Calley was named after William L. Calley Jr. (who has said of his part in the My Lai massacre “not a day goes by that I do not feel remorse”)?
    Would it matter that even fewer Americans would suspect any connection between Fort Laval and Pierre Laval, the one-time Premier of France, later head of the Vichy government, executed by France for treason?
    Would it matter that hardly .001% of all Americans would have any idea who any of the others might be, and that:
    • Fort Bales was named after Robert Bales, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the Kandahar massacre.
    • Fort Stroop was named after Jurgen Stroop, the SS officer who led the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, murdered nine U.S. soldiers who had been taken prisoner, and was executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
    • Fort Turner was not named after Harold Leo Turner, the recipient of the Medal of Honor, but Harald Turner, the SS general executed for crimes against humanity committed in Serbia.

    Indeed, I doubt that anyone reading this comment would have known who this specific Bales, this specific Stroop, and this specific Turner were before seeing them identified here. Does anyone reading this comment really think that if there were bases named after these specific individuals, we shouldn’t change those names the moment we did know?
    Of course not, because “not knowing” and “ignoring because some others don’t know” are not the same thing.

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  3. J_D_H

    If we want to name a post after an accomplished Civil War general from the South, I suggest Ft. George Thomas.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Ed

    A lot of very interesting comments. I would like to address one area; the idea that we should not name anything after Confederate soldiers simply because they lost, or because they were "evil."

    One of the more frustrating things I encounter is the way that wokism has corrupted the study of history. Instead of trying to examine human beings in the context of the era they lived in, we want to apply our modern mores -- or worse, a radical slice of our modern mores -- to these figures, and then judge them as bad, evil, etc.
    This is simply madness. Thomas Jefferson is among the best examples. He was born into a privileged life (and I use that term in its original meaning, not the nonsense that is currently in vogue), including inheriting land with slaves -- which was common in the area he lived and the time period he was born into. He was actually quite enlightened for his time period, troubled by his own ownership of slaves, and thought that slavery was an evil. He was also a flawed human being.
    As we all are. Every.....single.....last.....one of us. Something we might want to bear in mind.
    Among his flaws was poor management of money. He was, in a sense, trapped by his own inadequacies and the system he was born into. Among other things, he could never free his slaves because he was always in debt.

    The Civil War has some similarities. There were people on the side of the Confederacy that were good decent human beings by any measure. Most of the elites were born into a system that was supported by slavery. Most never thought to question it, or would argue against it, because it was "the way things are." It was a reality to them. It was "the" reality for them.

    There are people worthy of respect on the side of the Confederacy. There were men who fought with admirable courage, who did what they believed was right. In retrospect, they were wrong, but that does not make them necessarily "evil."

    A great many people have spoken about the incompetence, stupidity, wickedness, etc., of the Confederacy. A lot of it has truth in it. But if you have ever walked Gettysburg, you cannot look at the ground where Pickett's Charge occurred without feeling awe at the courage it would have taken to charge that hill. Most Confederates did what they believed was correct. Just as most Union soldiers did.

    The Confederacy was wrong. I am very, very glad it lost. But as Lincoln pointed out, they were fellow Americans. Wrong-headed, tied to a system that was steeped in one of the oldest evils of humanity, but still Americans. Most of them were not Nathan Bedford Forrests.

    Before you cast stones at the soldiers of the Confederacy, you might ask yourself: "If I were born in that era, on that side, would I have been on the side of the angels, as we now understand it?"

    Because the reality is that the vast majority of us would not have been.

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    1. Sampsoncrisp

      There is a very simple reason not to name federal military bases after confederate generals. They all took up arms against their country, the only crime set out in the constitution, and one punishable by death. There is no debate that they committed treason. The Fact that neither Lincoln nor Grant pressed the issue was a political decision, nothing more. Why people think that Braxton Bragg should be celebrated instead of tried and convicted remains a mystery to me.

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  5. Dan

    Why not name a fort after Benedict Arnold? I say this sarcastically, but my understanding is that he was popular with the troops, a good general, and a part of American history just like some Confederate generals.

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  6. Emma

    Why we celebrate the losing side at all is beyond me.

    But it is the GOP afterall. The question just answered itself.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Mmaughan0

    I would be interested to know what costs all these millions of dollars. Changing signs? Am I missing something? I do support it in principle, and am skeptical that it really costs that much.

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  8. Sean Smith

    Why anything should bear Bragg's name in particular is perplexing. As noted in the article, he was quarrelsome and incompetent. He lost the Battle of Chattanooga for the Confederacy and got far too many of his troops killed unnecessarily in numerous engagements due to poor planning and tactics.

    It's frustrating to see DeSantis pandering to Confederacy nostalgists. Nobody who bore arms for the cause of preserving the cruel, vicious, indefensible institution of human chattel slavery should be honored anywhere.

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  9. Avatar photo
    David Burke

    Fort Elmer Stewart Rhodes III

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  10. Scianti7

    I don't understand how it fits that if renaming the bases (at expense) was not worth it because the association with the Civil war wasn't obvious, Why would you need to expensively go back & reconnect the Civil War names? Hmm.

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