NEW: Trump orders the military's legendary independent newspaper @starsandstripes to stop publishing on Sept. 30. Shutdown plan due by Sept. 15. @USATODAY has the Pentagon memo: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/09/04/trump-and-stars-and-stripes-attacking-american-icon-column/5706859002/ via @USATODAY

I see lots of questions, so I'll just add that every administration has tried to or threatened to fuck with Stripes, cut its budget. The political press secretaries can't stand they can't control it's content and turn it into a pro-White House rag.

Trump has taken over VOA, Radio Free Europe, etc... planting loyalists, firing critical journalists. He can't do that with Stripes so he's just... zeroing out the budget. Congress didn't act, didn't take Trump/Esper's attacks on Stripes seriously, just shook their fists.

What's ridiculous is the idea that cutting Stripes is just cutting wasteful sending. It's a speck in the Pentagon's budget.

What's always been fair is that printing hard-copy newspapers in or flying them to far off warzones is a pretty old school and expensive way to get independent news to US troops at war -- the congressionally-mandated mission of Stripes. Seems quaint in digital phone era, but...

...there's never been a better way. At least, there wasn't in the big war years. The Baghdad embassy, there's wifi, sometimes, for those lucky enough to have something to access it with. At FOB whatever, maybe. At COP so-an-so, good luck.

Hard papers found at bases from Germany, Japan, Seoul, to Somalia, Irbil, and Kandahar were free, current, available, and targeted to the military community audiences with information they need. Not just general news cut and pasted from the wires. Not Trump-loving propaganda.

If Trump and Esper wanted to just save money, they could order up and invest a real push for Stripes to enter the digital era -- long overdue, if you ask me. Stripes is a govt office, had to beg for pennies just to get website updates that were already outdated.

Btw, I ran the @JamesFoleyFund fundraiser last year in my @starsandstripes hat from my reporting days. Jim and I were Stripes reporters at the same time.

For generations, @starsandstripes has served G.I.s and their families, and the American people, through many commanders in chief. Let's see if Congress wants it to survive Trump's censorship-fueled shutdown. (Photo: Baghdad, July 2011, by @CarlWoog, I believe.)

"Why cant we just send them USA Today?" some former admin officials in Obama's Pentagon would bark at me. The answer is the reporting. Unflinching, unyeilding, purposeful to a unique audience, all for American security.

Like these...

I picked up this copy of Stripes at chow time at Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, in 2017, where there were 9,500 Americans that few Americans even know about, launching essential intelligence missions in the skies above Iraq and Syria during the ISIS war.