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: Secretary of Defense 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 the people most of us 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 secretary of defense, you by may recall, who famously shared sensitive information regarding U.S. military strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen in March of last year over the unsecured commercial messaging app Signal. Included in the chat group was the editor of The Atlantic, who later revealed details he had learned.

Hegseth also imposed a pledge on journalists not to gather or transmit information about military affairs that had not been approved by his department for release. Most credible media groups refused to sign his pledge and have been denied Pentagon press credentials.

Stars and Stripes is owned by the Defense Department but is run by civilian editors. The paper’s staff does include service members, who work under the mentorship of civilian journalists. Congress members of both parties have consistently supported the publication’s mission to produce independent journalism consistent with the principles of the First Amendment.

The memo says Stars and Stripes will continue to “operate with editorial independence.” However, as Stars and Stripes reported, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell asserted that going forward the paper would be “by the warfighter and for the warfighter.”

Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin told NPR that the phrase “good order and discipline” raises concerns that reporters who are in the U.S. military might face court-martial.

“If they were to complete a story that the Defense Department did not like, and did not find ‘consistent with good order and discipline,’ would they be in legal jeopardy?” Slavin asked. “We don’t know the answer to that.”