Soon after the outbreak of war in Iran, as America was blitzing the country from a distance with a fusillade of bombs and missiles, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth exulted that we were “punching them while they’re down.” In those early days a US submarine sunk an Iranian naval vessel thousands of miles from the conflict—a vessel that had been taking part in an exchange visit in India. We could have captured the ship, but as President Trump explained, “one of my generals said: ‘Sir, it’s a lot more fun doing it this way.’” The commander in chief seems to have been caught up in the general gleefulness: after the US attacked Iranian facilities at Kharg Island, Trump said that most of the island had been “totally demolished,” but that the US might “hit it a few more times just for fun.”

Quite apart from the pointlessness of the war, it’s hard not to worry about the change in culture underway in the American military, which has become notoriously focused on what Hegseth calls “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” One large sign of that shift came in the last few days, as reports emerged that the Pentagon was cracking down on Stars and Stripes, the soldiers’ newspaper. As the paper itself reported last week, “an eight-page memo, dated March 9 and effective immediately, limits the use of wire services, bars comics and other syndicated features and states that content must be consistent with ‘good order and discipline,’ a phrase borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” It was the first outcome of a plan announced by Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell in January to stop the newspaper from publishing “woke distractions that syphon morale.”

Lay aside the question of whether a newspaper should be overseen by someone who employs archaic British usage (“syphon”), and lay aside as well the question of whether Parnell should even have a job in government (he dropped his MAGA campaign for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat after a judge awarded his estranged wife primary custody of their children; she testified that Parnell had choked her so forcefully she had to bite him to make him release his hold). The attack on the independence of Stars and Stripes is a powerful recapitulation of earlier moments in American military history, moments which make clear the blind alley down which Hegseth is charging his brigades at full speed.

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Stars and Stripes was born during the Civil War, when Illinois regiments stationed in Bloomfield, Missouri, found an abandoned printing press and began publishing a newspaper. Over time it gained a reputation for independence and accuracy, and for reflecting a view from the battlefield and the barracks, not the Pentagon. Its World War I editor was Harold Ross, who went on to found The New Yorker; the editorial staff in those years included Alexander Woolcott, later the country’s most famous drama critic, and the legendary columnist Franklin P. Adams. But the newspaper hit its zenith during World War II, and perhaps its most important contributor was the cartoonist Bill Mauldin.

Mauldin, a New Mexico native, enlisted at the age of eighteen and was assigned to the 45th Infantry Division, where he started drawing cartoons about a pair of “dogface” GIs, Willie and Joe, for the regimental paper. The cartoons struck a nerve with the troops, and within a few years he was drawing six panels a week for Stars and Stripes—he was even given his own jeep which he used to tour the front collecting material. (He was wounded in 1943 during the grim fighting at Monte Cassino, southeast of Rome.) Willie and Joe were unshaven, grimy, tired, and resourceful—in other words, the archetype of the American soldier who managed to lick the more spit-and-polish Germans across North Africa, Italy, and off the beach at Normandy. A typical panel might show them digging foxholes: “Me future is settled, Willie,” Joe said. “I’m gonna be a perfessor on types o’ European soil.”

These cartoons were well-loved—they won Mauldin not only the first of two Pulitzer Prizes at the age of twenty-three, but also the newly established Legion of Merit award from the armed forces. And they helped reinforce the idea that the paper, and the military it covered, was, while clearly a military, also a reflection of the democracy it served. But neither he nor the paper was universally loved. He had, in fact, one highly placed critic, General George S. Patton, who considered him an “unpatriotic anarchist” and wanted to ban Stars and Stripes from his Third Army. Patton was, as George C. Scott memorably portrayed in the eponymous 1970 movie bio, a pettifogging officer who wore shined brown boots and riding breeches and carried a swagger stick. Soldiers in his battalions were fined for being unshaven or not wearing a tie—regulations that Mauldin lampooned in his cartoons, and that he ran afoul of himself when he showed up in Third Army territory without a helmet. 

Patton complained vociferously to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, until finally Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher told the two men they should sit down and settle their differences. According to an account at the website of the Defense Media Network,

for forty-five minutes, Patton fulminated about “those god-awful things you call soldiers,” complaining that, amongst other things, they look “like goddamn bums.” Glaring at Mauldin, he growled as deeply as his high-pitched voice allowed, “What are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?”

Even after the meeting Patton continued to complain, until finally Eisenhower wrote a letter to theater commander Ben Lear laying down the law. “A great deal of pressure has been brought on me in the past to abolish such things as Mauldin’s cartoons. . . . You will make sure that the responsible officer knows he is not to interfere in matters of this kind.” Eisenhower felt that, far from “syphoning morale” or inciting mutiny, Mauldin’s cartoons (and by extension the reporting in Stars and Stripes) let soldiers see their frustrations expressed. Also, of course, there was the small matter of the fact that the US of that era stood for freedom against the authoritarianism of the Axis. “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ paper,” Eisenhower said, “and we won’t interfere.”

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Hegseth is more than a little Pattonesque in his denunciation of those who don’t share his obsession with pushups and kettlebells (“it is tiring,” he says, to “see fat troops” in formation). But the differences between him and Patton are several. For one, Patton was an effective general, skilled at rousing his troops to fight. As Mauldin himself later said, “I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn’t like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes.”  

There’s little sign that Hegseth is a great motivator (though increasingly it seems he’s trying to use millenarian Christianity as one tool). But there’s another more important difference—Patton had men above him who were willing to rein him in. When he slapped two traumatized soldiers for “malingering” in field hospitals, threatening one with a pistol, Eisenhower forced him to apologize, and sidelined him during crucial months of the war. (In the lead-up to D-Day, his job was to pretend to lead a nonexistent army gearing up for an attack at Calais.) By all accounts his commander in chief is at least as bellicose as his Secretary of War, given that he’s now threatening to blow things up “twenty times harder” if Iran doesn’t bend to his will.

In fact, Hegseth’s attempt to remove Stars and Stripes as one check on his behavior is utterly aligned with the Trump administration’s threat that the FCC will revoke the licenses of a media committing “treason” by daring to report on the failures of the Iran war. Hegseth and Trump are also aligned in trying to remove any legal checks on the military’s actions, effectively eliminating the Department of Defense’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program and firing top military lawyers—or, as Hegseth put it, waging war on “politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement” in an effort to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” In this unaccountable military, it seems, there’s no place for criticism, not even from “the soldiers’ paper.”