Douglas B. Wilson, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said the decision to relocate the newspaper to Fort Meade “is not a matter of reducing independence for Stars and Stripes. It is a matter of reducing rent costs to the taxpayer.”

He added, “In an era when the entire department is having to find efficiencies, and budgets are being reduced, it would be hard to explain why $1 million a year in rent should not be replaced by free office space.”

Terry Leonard, editorial director at Stars and Stripes, said he and the staff do not object to moving — only to a move that locates them at the headquarters for official Pentagon media operations.

“It’s very hard for people to believe that we can be a news organization subsidized by the Defense Department and still be editorially independent,” Mr. Leonard said. “There is a history of improper interference and even censorship by the military and by civilians within the Defense Department.”

The issue continued to percolate late into the week on Capitol Hill. Melvin W. Russell, the acting director of the Pentagon public affairs agency at Fort Meade, officially called Defense Media Activity, was invited to meet Friday morning with staff members of the House Armed Services Committee to explain his decision and answer their queries.

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After the session, a House staff member said the committee “does have concerns over potential command interference with the operations of Stars and Stripes, and this is something we are going to look at.”

For decades, Stars and Stripes has served as a platform for some of America’s most famous bylines, as well as for the trademark combat cartoons by Bill Mauldin.

But the newspaper itself has long suffered from a case of journalistic schizophrenia.

Its operating budget is about $48 million a year. But since there is no profitable business model for delivering a newspaper’s daily print edition to military bases around the world — including the harshest reaches of the combat zone — subscriptions and advertising cover only 52 percent of its costs. The rest comes from a Defense Department appropriation.

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The newspaper has angered Pentagon and military leadership over the decades by giving voice to complaints from military personnel. In 2009, it was awarded the prestigious Polk Award for articles about the military’s decision to hire a contractor to assess journalists in Afghanistan, although the series was criticized by the Stars and Stripes ombudsman at the time.

The newspaper also beat the civilian media in raising questions about a Pentagon-sponsored program, “America Supports You,” which was designed to focus awareness on the sacrifices of the troops and their families — but which became the subject of an official audit over financing irregularities.

The debate over relocation and independence for Stars and Stripes only underscores how the newspaper also is facing the same crisis of other print dailies across the nation: A decline of core readership.

The American military has left Iraq, taking with it 150,000 potential readers. The troop withdrawal from Afghanistan through 2014 is a presidential directive, and the Army is cutting the number of combat brigades in Europe in half over the next five years. A circulation of more than 100,000 during the peak of the Iraq war is now 70,000 — and dropping.

So, like many newspapers, Stars and Stripes is enhancing its presence on the Internet, stripes.com, to more readily reach military personnel and their families at garrisons in the United States and bases around the world, and to appeal to more veterans. Last month, the newspaper’s Web edition had 675,000 unique visitors.