The Pentagon fired the editor for calling Stars and Stripes a newspaper.

The Pentagon moved Friday against its own newspaper. Stars and Stripes, which is paid for with defense money and still claims a legal duty to report independently of the chain of command, says editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, publisher Max D. Lederer Jr., and Middle East reporter Lara Korte received separation notices. The paper printed that on itself.

Slavin said the charge is insubordination. He said it traces to a CBS Sunday Morning interview last month in which he told the network that turning the paper into public relations for the building would be a line he would not cross. He is reviewing a notice of proposed separation, not a court finding.

Korte was on the same CBS segment. She said there that she works for Stars and Stripes, not the Pentagon, not an administration, not a policymaker. In a Friday statement she called the firings “a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.” That is her line. It is not a verdict.

Do not flatten this into a simple “press vs. Trump” cartoon. Stars and Stripes is not a private paper. It lives inside the Defense Department. Congress and the department’s own rules still tell it to stay independent of public affairs. The Pentagon has been testing that sentence all year. In March it moved to bar some wire copy and comics, told the paper to stay consistent with “good order and discipline,” and put the secretary’s public-affairs shop into oversight. In April it fired the ombudsman Congress created to watch that independence. On Tuesday Lederer, publisher since 2007 and at the paper more than 30 years, told staff his idea of the mission differed in “fundamental ways” from Defense leadership and set a Sept. 30 retirement. Friday he was fired anyway, according to the paper.

A Pentagon official, unnamed, confirmed the notices to Stars and Stripes and pointed reporters to an open letter from Navy Capt. William Urban, the newly installed military deputy to the publisher. This desk has the letter’s existence. It does not have Urban’s full text in a form it can quote, so it is not inventing one. If the building wants the last word, it can put the letter on the record in plain English.

The tell is the charge itself. If the paper is independent, firing the editor for saying so is the policy. If it is a house organ, the CBS line was insubordination by design. Washington is trying to keep both stories: a charter that says “independent,” and a newsroom that answers to “good order.” Troops do not get both. They get whichever one the secretary is willing to sign.