Oh, no. Stars and Stripes is under fire again.

Controversy is not exactly unknown to the legendary military newspaper. Born during the Civil War, Stars and Stripes has taken all sorts of flak and survived, impressively for a publication owned and operated by the U.S. military that nevertheless calls itself an “independent” voice.

As someone who served overseas as a drafted Vietnam-era army journalist, I can tell you that military journalism is not an oxymoron. Or, at least, it’s not supposed to be.

But “Stripes,” as its commonly called in the service, has a new and imposing critic: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, famous — or infamous — for his personal crusade against “woke” culture and its imagined effects on the nation’s “warfighters,” the Trump administration’s ideologically loaded term for what most Americans call service members.

As Stars and Stripes revealed, the Defense Department issued a “modernization plan” for the paper with alarming stipulations. It “limits the use of wire services, bars comics and other syndicated features,” and, rather ominously, requires that “content must be consistent with ‘good order and discipline,’ a phrase borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” the paper reported.

As a fan of Stripes going back to my military days, I immediately wondered what changes Hegseth’s culture war might bring. It looks a lot like an attempt to make the paper less interesting to its readers, not to mention less credible as an independent voice of news and analysis.

It’s not exactly a surprise coming from Hegseth. This is the same defense secretary, you may recall, who famously........

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