A “chicken plate,” in military parlance, is a protective shield used in a variety of combat situations. During the Vietnam War, chicken plates were inserted into vests—they are resistant against small-arms fire, but they’re also bulky and hot. So some pilots sat on them instead, which had the added benefit of providing protection against bullets that came from below.
I first encountered another type of chicken plate in Iraq, where I was embedded with a convoy of American service members patrolling outside of Tikrit.
On this particular morning, I sat alongside three soldiers inside an up-armored Humvee while a gunner manned the turret. But that gunner—James Murphy, a sergeant from New Jersey—wasn’t sitting in his sling, which was little more than a seat-belt strap hooked between two sides of the turret. If he sat down, the chicken plate would block his view. This left Murphy with a choice: stand up for hours and expose his head and chest, or remain behind the plate’s limited protection and endanger the convoy by missing a threat.
For the dozen or so gunners I spoke with, the choice was clear. Two of them removed the chicken plate entirely for a better view.
The military had no specific data on gunner casualties or whether the chicken plates were preventing them. Yet an Army general in Iraq was asking his staff why they were losing so many gunners. One officer I spoke with at the time told me that the answer was obvious the moment someone stood in the turret.
[Tom Nichols: Hegseth’s Pentagon lurches off the rails]
I reported a series of stories on gunners for Stars and Stripes, a newspaper with a long history of editorial independence despite being housed within the Department of Defense. A few weeks later, after returning to my home at the time—a room at the bachelor officers’ quarters on a Marine Corps base in Okinawa—I received a message from our Pentagon beat reporter, who told me that military officials had read the series and were fast-tracking improved equipment for deployment. They’d found a way to help protect the gunners without blocking their view from the turret.
I don’t want to overstate my role. At least some military officials were aware of the issue and had been testing prototypes for better shields. But many of the soldiers weren’t willing to discuss with senior leaders the specifics of what they needed, out of concern that they’d be viewed as complaining. I’m grateful that they trusted me enough to tell their stories.
Looking back now, what feels remarkable isn’t the lack of proper equipment. It’s the way the Pentagon was willing to take independent journalism that spotlighted deficiencies and use it to improve conditions for service members.
Uniformed military leaders have not lost the means to analyze and act on useful journalism. But publicly denouncing the reporting or the news outlet makes it far less likely that they will. Attacking people for telling the truth creates a chilling effect for truth tellers—including those who are themselves in the military.
The best journalism unearths information that complex bureaucracies overlook or suppress, intentionally or not. When leaders treat asking tough questions and reporting uncomfortable facts as disloyalty, they devalue a tool that can help them fix crucial problems.
The danger in this devaluation is immense, especially now; it comes as U.S. service members are once again fighting in the Middle East. The Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing on combat operations in Iran since May 5. The Correspondents’ Corridor, where reporters worked inside the Pentagon for decades, is closed while court appeals continue on press-access restrictions. The New York Times is suing the Pentagon on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the Pentagon’s attempts to prevent independent reporting are clearly unconstitutional. (I should disclose that I, too, am suing the Pentagon. I was fired after I said in an appearance on CBS News that my personal red line would be if the Pentagon ever instructed me not to publish a perfectly accurate story. It is telling that I am being fired for describing the most anodyne of journalistic ethics, a position that any self-respecting reporter in any free society would hold, and that the Pentagon interpreted as insubordination.)
Stars and Stripes has its roots in the Civil War, when Union soldiers took over a printing press in Bloomfield, Missouri. The paper was revived during World War I under General John “Black Jack” Pershing and has published continuously since 1942, when General George C. Marshall recognized the value it provided troops and aimed to follow Pershing’s example. “No official control was ever exercised over the matter which went into” Stars and Stripes, Marshall said of the WWI edition.
It didn’t take long for that editorial freedom to be challenged. General George Patton complained about the “Willie and Joe” cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s depictions of soldiers as they often appeared—tired and dirty. (Mauldin would have known; he was himself a soldier.) But General Dwight Eisenhower rejected Patton’s drive to control the reporting itself. “It is the soldier’s paper,” he said, “and we won’t interfere,” according to the historian Stephen Ambrose’s foreword in a book by Mauldin, whose wartime cartoons earned him the 1945 Pulitzer Prize.
The newspaper continued to operate overseas after World War II, hiring civilian journalists to work alongside service members. But attempts at curtailing Stripes’ independence periodically arose. Congress documented occasional pressures in the 1960s. In the ’80s, a General Accounting Office report to Congress found conclusive evidence of censorship, and pointed out the “inherent cultural conflict” between the First Amendment mission and the military’s own.
Those findings led the House Armed Services Committee to direct the Pentagon to establish an ombudsman, responsible to Congress, who would monitor the free flow of information to service members through Stars and Stripes. And in 1993, a Defense Department directive affirmed that Stars and Stripes is editorially independent of the military chain of command. A subsequent federal regulation added to those protections.
In 2020, the Pentagon proposed cutting all funding to Stars and Stripes, after the department’s comptroller stated that it is “probably not the best way that we communicate any longer.” The idea drew a bipartisan rebuke in Congress. The White House agreed with the lawmakers, and Stripes lived on.
Last November, I moved to Washington, D.C., to accept the editor-in-chief job at the paper, where I’d already been serving as Europe and Middle East chief, based near Ramstein Air Base, in Germany.
Two months later, Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell fired a broadside at Stars and Stripes. On January 15, he posted on X that the news organization must be rid of “woke distractions that syphon morale.”
The same day, the Pentagon revoked the federal regulation it had established in 1994, calling it unnecessary. The Daily Wire, which reported that half of all Stripes content would come from the military’s public-affairs team, and that civilian reporters would be replaced by military members. When Stars and Stripes reporters called the Pentagon press office for comment and clarification, they received nothing more than a referral to the tweet and the Daily Wire story.
[Read: Why is the Pentagon afraid of the press?]
On February 28, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The first Stars and Stripes story came from a wire service, because there aren’t any Stripes reporters inside Iran. But within hours, we had half a dozen stories focused on the U.S. military bases in the region and the people there. In Bahrain, civilians were given the order to evacuate an hour after missiles began falling on the headquarters base of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.
The coverage drew millions of readers, and a video shot by one of our active-duty reporters of a plume rising over the Navy base was viewed all over the world. We worked hard on covering the Iran conflict and thought little of that January tweet—that is, until a Pentagon memo came in mid-March.
The memo simultaneously affirmed our independence and added restrictions. That wire-service story from Iran was now forbidden, along with any other paid wire-service news. So were the comics, of all things. Our publishing decisions would be subject to “good order and discipline”—a line borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Our military reporters, who function as interns and receive mentorship from seasoned civilian journalists, now had to wonder whether writing a story might land them in legal jeopardy.
I told military reporters who were worried that a story might hurt their career to let us know, and we’d reassign it. Meanwhile, the staff never compromised on their ethics and values. They reported fairly and accurately and, when called for, held power to account.
The ombudsman wrote a column that assailed the news restrictions, in keeping with the duties set by Congress. Two weeks later, the Defense Department fired her.
By the time I sat down with CBS’s David Martin in late June, I had spoken with no fewer than 16 news outlets and authors about Stars and Stripes. Martin asked me about the “woke distractions” referenced in the January tweet and I answered honestly—that the Pentagon had never explained to us what that meant.
Martin also asked whether I had a personal red line when it came to press restrictions, and I said that I did. If the Pentagon were to say, “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story. Run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon. That would be a red line.”
My response to hypothetical censorship was consistent with what military leaders have said for more than a century, and with the Defense Department’s own directive barring censorship and news management. It is also consistent with basic journalistic ethics: Without editorial independence, journalists cannot uphold their duty to the public.
As part of the CBS interview, the Middle East correspondent Lara Korte stated that she worked for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon. She made the distinction to underscore her independence, which is essential to credibility. I learned approximately a week later that the Pentagon press office wasn’t happy about the interview, but that was all I heard.
On August 12, seven weeks after the CBS interview, the Pentagon sent notices of proposed separation for Korte and me to Stripes’ publisher, Max Lederer, and told him to sign them.
Lederer was an Airborne soldier turned Army attorney who was awarded the Bronze Star before he joined Stars and Stripes. He worked his way up through business operations to serve for two decades as publisher.
He reviewed the separation notices and pointed out legal and ethical inconsistencies. Those concerns were dismissed. Rather than sign the notices, he submitted his resignation. (They fired him instead.)
On August 21, the three of us received the separation notices, which listed insubordination as the primary charge. The notices issued to Korte and me cited our CBS comments but didn’t state which order we were purportedly disobeying. Lederer’s firing was for not signing the documents in the first place.
That same day, the Pentagon replaced the directive issued in 1993. Among other things, it bars comics deemed editorial in nature and prevents reporters from using the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of the news organization. I can’t think of another American media outlet with the same restriction.
[Anne Applebaum: The Pentagon’s preferred propaganda model]
About an hour after we received our separation notices, the military deputy to the publisher, who’d arrived two weeks earlier, ordered a 10-page document to be published on Stripes.com within 30 minutes. The document stated that Stripes would continue to run independent journalism and that “it is time to take them at their word,” referring to the Pentagon.
I do take them at their word. All of the words they’ve put out since January, along with their actions. The Pentagon has articulated a remarkably narrow view of press freedom. The government may stop short of censoring an individual story. But it will seek to fire newsroom leaders for opposing the replacement of accurate reporting with press releases. It will strip an organization of basic reporting tools it deems unnecessary or distasteful. And it will discredit the source of the reporting if a story is perceived as unflattering to the president or his secretary of defense.
The press isn’t a perfect institution. A global 2026 Reuters Institute survey found that the percentage of people who report trusting the news dropped to the lowest level since Reuters began asking the question in 2015; in the U.S., only 25 percent of Americans said they trust the news most of the time. Whatever combination of press failures and partisanship produced this decline, public trust has eroded. And it’s that erosion that has made it much easier for officials to delegitimize accurate, balanced journalism.
Reporters, like anyone, make mistakes, but ethical journalism remains fundamentally useful to government and to the citizens who hold it accountable. People in large organizations—the U.S. military included—often avoid delivering bad news for fear of appearing to oppose a leader’s plans. Independent reporting moves information forward, but only if sources know they’ll be able to speak with journalists without fear of reprisal, and if they believe that leaders are open to reacting to criticism like professionals.
That’s what happened in Iraq. The gunners knew what they needed to do their job safely. They didn’t want to be viewed as complainers. Independent journalism sent the message to those who needed to hear it.
*Image sources: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Lyalya Go / Getty; HUM Images / Getty; Toronto Star Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty; Library of Congress.
The post The Inside Story of What Happened at Stars and Stripes appeared first on The Atlantic.
