By TARA COPP Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has signed an order restoring the name of a storied special operations forces base in North Carolina back to Fort Bragg and said Tuesday that there will be more name changes coming.
Speaking to reporters in Germany, Hegseth hinted at a wholesale reversal of the broader Biden administration effort in 2023 to remove names that honored Confederate leaders, including nine Army bases. It sets up a potentially costly, complicated and delicate process that could run afoul of the law.
“As the president has said, and I’ve said as well, we’re not done there,” Hegseth said Tuesday when asked about the decision to revert the base name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, but changing the service member it commemorates. “I never called it Fort Liberty because it wasn’t Fort Liberty. It’s Fort Bragg.”
Hegseth said the original name is a legacy for troops who lived and served there and that it was a shame to change it. He said he deliberately referred to Bragg and Fort Benning — the Army base in Columbus, Georgia, which is now called Fort Moore — as he entered the Pentagon on his first day.
“There are other bases that have been renamed that erodes that very same legacy,” he said. “There’s a reason I said Bragg and Benning when I walked into the Pentagon on day one. But it’s not just Bragg and Benning. There are a lot of other service members that have connections. And we’re going to do our best to restore it.”
The North Carolina base was renamed Fort Liberty in 2023. Its original namesake, Gen. Braxton Bragg, was a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key Civil War battles, contributing to the Confederacy’s downfall.
Hegseth is renaming the base to honor Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who the Army said was a World War II hero who earned a Silver Star and Purple Heart for exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge.
The choice of the World War II private first class got around a law prohibiting the military from naming a base after a Confederate leader. It sets up the potential for the Defense Department to do the same for the other eight Army bases that were renamed — searching through massive military records for service members with the same last names who could be cited to revert to the former names.
That effort, however, also could be seen as a slap against some of the highly decorated service members whose names are now used for the bases. The former Fort Gordon in Georgia, for example, was renamed Fort Eisenhower to commemorate President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led allied forces in Europe in World War II.
Fort Moore is named after Lt. Gen. Harold Gregory Moore Jr., who earned the Distinguished Service Cross for valor and fought in the Battle of Ia Drang in the Vietnam War.
Army officials said they do not have any cost estimates yet for changing the name again to Fort Bragg.
On Tuesday, the Army released an initial service verification for Bragg, who was born in Webster, Maine, and served as a toxic gas handler from July 1943 to November 1945. Bragg deployed to England from August 1944 to August 1945 and left the Army in the rank of private first class, Army spokesman Maj. Travis Shaw said.
Bragg’s awards include the World War II Victory Medal, the Silver Star Medal, the Purple Heart Medal, the Army Good Conduct Medal, the European African Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three bronze stars, a Parachute Badge and a Combat Infantry Badge, Shaw said.
In a video posted on X announcing the renaming, Hegseth said, “That’s right. Bragg is back!”
In reality, the base had still been widely known as Bragg, the new name having not really taken hold.
The renaming will add costs when the Trump administration is trying to find savings through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The 2022 base renaming commission estimated that renaming Bragg, including all the signage, paint jobs on police and emergency responder vehicles and other items, would cost at least $6.3 million. In 2023, the base said the total costs were going to be around $8 million.