Roll Tide.

The inert cannonballs, which were — naturally — wrapped in paper towels, were discovered during the baggage screening process at Alabama’s Gulf Shores International Airport and later determined by police to have been stolen from the nearby coastal stronghold Fort Morgan.

“My first thought was, ‘I couldn’t see a fuse and need to get some help quick,’” TSA officer Justin Dupree recalled in a release. “I couldn’t see the entire item but was scared I might have been holding a live explosive.”

Dupree noted the antique artillery projectiles ranged in size, with the largest comparable to a grapefruit.

“I had never seen anything quite this unique,” Dupree said. “I’ve seen inert grenades and training munitions but never an Indiana Jones-esque stolen artifact-type situation.”

A TSA explosives specialist and the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office were subsequently notified and determined that the cannonballs posed no threat.

Law enforcement investigating the incident stated the passenger claimed to be unaware of how the projectiles were acquired. The cannonballs were later returned to Fort Morgan, the release added.

Passenger attempts to transport illegal items, including outlandish weaponry, through the screening process are, of course, nothing new.

In a more glaring example from 2019, a Florida man traveling through Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley International Airport set off alarms after his bag was found to contain a disassembled rocket-propelled grenade.

The individual was subsequently taken into an inspection area, where he told airport security he was under the impression he could bring the checked RPG on the plane, CBS Philadelphia reported.

Inspection of the weapon itself revealed that the launcher was not in working order, and the grenade was a realistic replica.

The items were confiscated by security, and, miraculously, the individual boarded his flight on time.

Joseph Lavar Davis, 47, was convicted of stealing over $1.1 million worth of the military’s pre-packaged Meals-Ready-to-Eat, or MREs, in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Western District of Texas, said Tuesday, in a scheme involving three other co-defendants and more than 200 pallets of the shelf-stable rations.

MREs, typically sealed in distinctive brown branding, are used to feed troops basic nutrients in austere situations and training exercises.

Known for their energy content as opposed to their taste, the emergency rations can be eaten hot or cold and are notorious for producing foul flatulence and blocked bowels — oftentimes contributing to the MRE’s other moniker of Meal, Refusing to Exit.

According to a statement from the office, the group used false paperwork to acquire MREs from Fort Bliss and Davis created false requests, rented vehicles to move the calorically dense provisions, fixed prices and collected compensation in the operation.

The FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division agents executed a search warrant on a civilian warehouse in August 2020 and found scores of pallets of MREs that an investigation showed was a holding facility for a company that purchased the rations from people who had pillaged them from Fort Bliss, the statement said.

Davis was named in the February 2025 indictment — along with the three others — for conspiracy to commit theft of government property and a substantive count of theft of government property between Feb. 4, 2020, and Aug. 12, 2020.

The office said that Davis learned the Army’s food procurement process while working in food service supply in the service. When he retired, the statements said, he got a job as a civilian contractor in a similar position.

“Joseph Davis betrayed the very country he once swore to protect in an effort to satisfy his own selfish ambition and a jury of his peers held him accountable for it,” said U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons.

Davis served as a culinary specialist in the Army from May 1998 to May 2018, according to an Army spokesperson. He left the service at the rank of sergeant first class.

Forty-year-old goalie Josimar “Vozinha” Dias recently earned a certificate from the Guinness World Records book as “the oldest goalkeeper to keep a clean sheet” in a World Cup debut with his acrobatic play on June 15 for the Tubarões Azuis — Blue Sharks — of Cape Verde, turning away shot after shot to hold powerhouse Spain to 0-0 draw.

Cape Verde again produced a stunner on Sunday, coming from behind to earn a 2-2 draw with heavily favored Uruguay, a score that featured the tiny island nation’s first-ever goal in a World Cup.

“This means everything for our country,” Cape Verde coach Pedro Leitão Brito told the Associated Press. “We have always said that we wanted everybody to see our country, our team and we have shown organization and braveness and this is proof of what our country is about — resilience and to try to overcome hardships.”

Vozinha, however, was in tears after the June 15 match over the money and red tape for a visa that kept his mother from attending her son’s shutout of Spain.

“I cried after the game because I grew up with my grandparents when I was a kid, and they could not be there,” he told reporters. “They passed away a few years ago. My mum could not be here either for a visa issue, and the money we had to pay for it. We did not manage to do this in time.”

House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the only member of Congress of Cape Verdean descent, then worked with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to clear up the $15,000 visa issue.

“No mother should miss the chance to see her child make history,” Jeffries said in a statement. All fees were subsequently waived, Jeffries added.

Vozinha’s mother was in attendance on Sunday to watch her son against Uruguay. Cape Verde next plays on June 26 against Saudi Arabia, with a possible chance to punch their ticket to the elimination round on the line.

The goalie’s heroics and the flap over the visa, meanwhile, drew attention to the long history of the U.S. connection to Cape Verde, sometimes called Cabo Verde, an island chain and former Portuguese possession about 350 miles off the west coast of Africa.

In comments for a Smithsonian Magazine article, Donald Heflin, the former U.S ambassador to Cape Verde, noted, “Cabo Verdean Americans are one of [the U.S.’s] oldest immigrant communities, going back to the colonial whaling days.”

“We have the names of five Cabo Verdeans who fought in the American Revolution,” Heflin continued. “And their proud military tradition grows from there, with the numbers of Cabo Verdean Americans in uniform getting larger with each of America’s wars.”

One of those Cape Verdeans was Joachim Pease, who served aboard the Union sloop of war Kearsarge during the June 19, 1864, epic battle against the Confederate raider Alabama off the French port of Cherbourg.

The Union Army was segregated at the time — the Navy was not. Aboard Kearsarge, Pease served as the loader on a 32-pounder gun that helped sink the Alabama, according to the Smithsonian article.

His Medal of Honor citation — considered by many to be the first for an African-born service member — said that he “exhibited marked coolness and good conduct and was highly recommended by the divisional officer for gallantry under fire.”

Pease disappeared after the Kearsarge returned to Boston. He was never located.

The Navy was unable to present him with the medal, which is now on display at the National Museum of the United States Navy in the Washington Navy Yard in Washington.

What most players sprinting across the map won’t know is that three of those characters are built from real Marines, and that the men behind the motion capture have spent the years since their service trying to keep other veterans alive.

Prime Hall, Don Tran and Rick Briere served together in the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. In the game, they appear as Rob Brooke, Douglas Pham and Atticus Moore. Out of it, they are business partners, nonprofit founders and, by their own account, brothers who have buried too many friends.

For Hall, the throughline from combat to civilian life is simple to name. “It takes a village,” he said. He frames it the way a Raider would. In a fight, you want 360-degree security. After service, he said, that security becomes “your perimeter of the relationships and the people that you have in your life.”

That perimeter matters because the landing is rough.

Hall enlisted in 2005 and was medically retired in 2017 after an insider attack years earlier left damage that finally surfaced.

Stacked with prescriptions, he said he began to feel like he was “in the passenger seat of life.” A holistic-healing retreat in late 2019 turned things around, and the lesson stuck. “You can only do so much on your own,” he said. “At a certain point, you know, you gotta tap into something bigger than yourself.”

The three built that something. Deep End Fitness, their underwater training program, started the year the trio got out and now coaches athletes and civilians nationwide.

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Hall ran a nonprofit, Marine Raider Challenge, until the unit relocated to North Carolina. Tran helped start another, Operation Resilience. The mission Hall keeps returning to, though, is grimmer. He has lost roughly 10 friends to suicide — part of a toll that still claims an average of about 17 veterans a day. The work, he said, is about turning each loss into a chance “to create a positive shift somehow in the community.”

His guiding phrase: “Be what’s missing.”

Tran describes the transition trap in operational terms. In the military, the stakes were high but the problem was simple. “Now it’s like, when you’re out [the problem] became extremely complex.”

Money, school, family and a young business all competed at once. What got them through was dropping the act they had all learned to wear.

“In the Raiders you’re this super tough guy,” Tran said. Out of uniform, that facade has a short shelf life. He and his teammates learned to say the thing operators rarely say: “I need some help, dude. Like, this is not working.”

That honesty, he added, is also what reaches the veterans they mentor. “That humanizes you.”

Briere, who admits he still questions whether he belongs in a mentor’s chair, landed on the same point. “It’s okay to drop the armor,” he said.

He describes a bond that no longer requires performance. “There’s no animosity, there’s only transparency.” Months can pass without the three talking, he said, and they pick back up like no time has passed.

None of them set out to be in a video game. The opportunity came through their Deep End Fitness work, and the developers’ focus on authenticity meant the men actually played the parts in motion-capture suits.

Briere, a lifelong gamer, still can’t quite believe it. Seeing the characters come to life, he said, “it’s surreal to me.”

Tran’s reaction was more practical. “My character doesn’t die,” he said.

The three are clear about what they hope the game does beyond entertain. Hall sees the characters as a doorway, “an access point for people to look into what we’re up to” and the work they have done since getting out, he says. For Tran, it is also a chance to put the Raider legacy alongside the units that already have their movies and books.

Asked what they would tell a struggling veteran, the answers came easily.

“Find your next North Star, dude, and navigate towards that,” Tran said. “You’ve done it before, probably in a way harder world.”

Hall offered a message of hope, the kind he says he is living proof of.

“If I can do it, anybody can do it,” he said. “Give yourself some grace.” Even a broken clock, he likes to remind himself, is right twice a day.

Veterans and service members in crisis can reach the Veterans Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or by texting 838255.

His famous Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — or OODA — Loop described the mental cycle by which combatants, from fighter pilots to generals, assess and react to a constantly changing situation.

Those with a faster OODA Loop could exploit opportunities while their befuddled opponents struggled to understand what was going on.

Germany crushed France in 1940 largely because of a sluggish French command system that was always one OODA step behind the swift panzer divisions. More recently, OODA might explain why tactically rigid Russian tank columns were decimated by outnumbered but agile Ukrainian troops in 2022.

Had the Soviets invaded Western Europe during the Cold War, NATO would have relied on OODA — plus airpower and more advanced weapons technology — to stop the Soviet steamroller.

To the troops watching waves of Soviet tanks roll into the Fulda Gap or the North German Plain, OODA would have been just a buzzword. But NATO needed every advantage it could get to compensate for superior Soviet numbers and firepower.

Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War, published by Matrix Games, is a computer wargame that depicts a hypothetical Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany in 1989.

But it is more than just another World War III wargame. Flashpoint Campaigns is the OODA Loop gamified. In fact, the game comes in two versions: the regular game for armchair generals, and a professional edition for real soldiers.

Flashpoint Campaigns is a 2-D map game, with NATO platoons and Warsaw Pact companies waging battalion- to division-sized battles. Set in the twilight of the Cold War, much of the hardware — such as Abrams and T-72 tanks, and Bradley and BMP infantry fighting vehicles — are still around today.

Players issue orders to their troops, such as movement, direct fire, calling in artillery and airstrikes, combat engineering operations and resupply. For example, a tank platoon can be ordered to head to a crossroads via a series of designated waypoints along the route.

Units can be given standard operating procedures, or SOPs, such as determining at what range to open fire, when to change firing position and when to retreat. Enemy units are usually invisible until spotted. With Late Cold War weapons so devastating, combat is deadly and proper concealment and reconnaissance a must.

After a player finishes issuing commands, they can hit the start button. A game clock then appears and a certain number of minutes elapse, during which units try to fulfill orders.

It all sounds like a straightforward process — until OODA intervenes.

Unlike many wargames, players in Flashpoint Campaigns can’t give orders to their troops at will. Instead, only at certain intervals does the game clock pause and allow commanders to issue fresh orders. This reflects the time it takes for the command system to collect information, analyze it, reach a decision and pass a new order to subordinates.

Like an object in motion in Newtonian physics, units will try to execute their last set of orders until new instructions arrive. That tank platoon heading down the road toward a village will keep going toward that village until told otherwise, even if the tactical situation has changed.

This is where NATO’s OODA advantage kicks in. The NATO player might have to wait, say, for 14 minutes of game time to elapse before issuing fresh orders. For the Soviets, the delay might be 23 minutes, or about 50% longer.

This means that NATO will have more opportunities to give new orders than the Soviets do. In turn, this means NATO troops can more quickly react to new threats such as enemy forces on their flank, or exploit discovery of a gap in the enemy’s lines.

It also means that NATO can be more flexible in its planning, rather than having to anticipate the tactical situation far in advance.

“We all know what happens when plans make contact with the enemy,” Robert Crandall, president of On Target Simulations, which designed Flashpoint Campaigns, told Military Times. “NATO spent considerable efforts to train for what happens after that contact and to respond faster than their counterparts. This could let them operate inside the Warsaw Pact command loop and outmaneuver them.”

But even NATO has OODA problems in the game. The presence of electronic warfare, in which the Soviets invested heavily, lengthens the interval before a player can give orders. Units engaged in combat will require 50% more time to react to new orders.

And commanders who send too many orders to their troops will receive an unpleasant surprise: too much radio traffic reveals the location as a headquarters, marking it for an artillery or airstrike.

Indeed, some U.S. Army experts today worry American command posts are so chatty that they will be targeted in wartime.

As battles progress in Flashpoints Campaigns, and units takes losses and headquarters are disrupted, command delays will inevitably lengthen for both sides.

Clausewitz’s “friction of war” will become an impediment, though a bit less so for NATO. Commanders on both sides will have to grit their teeth and accept that they can’t control their troops as they would like to.

Would NATO’s tighter OODA Loop have been enough to defeat the Soviets?

“One of the nicest compliments the game received came from a former Warsaw Pact officer who said he played the game using strict Warsaw Pact doctrine and won,” Crandall recalled.

“If the Warsaw Pact player has figured things out correctly, his initial plan will not have needed much, if any, adjustment and just rolls along at maximum speed. His opponent will be wrong-footed and at the mercy of the OODA Loop to react in time. With the fast-moving, hyper-lethal forces of 1989, good luck with that.”

In some ways, Flashpoint Campaigns is a memorial to another era.

The year 1989 was the twilight of 20th Century mechanized warfare. With the threat of drones paralyzing battlefield maneuver in the Ukraine War, discussing OODA’s influence on tactics seem almost quaint.

And yet, there is a reason why there is a global arms race today to develop smarter AI, quicker kill chains between sensors and weapons, and tightly networked forces that can act faster than the enemy.

Every year, the OODA Loop seems to tighten, with less margin to fall behind. As OODA reminds us, time is too precious a commodity to squander.

Backed by Universal Pictures, the “Transformers” director is slated to shepherd the speed-of-light-turnaround project based on the April 3 shoot down of a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle and subsequent rescue of its crew during U.S.-led operations against the Islamic Republic, Deadline reported.

The untitled movie is expected to be based on a book by author Mitchell Zuckoff, which will be released in 2027, according to Deadline. Bay previously worked with Zuckoff on the film adaptation of 13 Hours, which chronicled the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

On April 3, the F-15, call sign Dude 44, was downed by Iranian air defenses at approximately 4:40 a.m. local time, becoming the first manned aircraft to be lost to hostile anti-aircraft fire since Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28.

Both crew members ejected and landed miles apart. Though the pilot was located within hours and rescued — after an intense fight — the aircraft’s weapons systems officer remained on the move, evading Iranian forces in the Zagros Mountains, treating his own wounds and taking cover in a mountain crevice, according to U.S. President Donald Trump, who called the rescue mission “one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing combat search-and-rescue missions ever attempted by the military.”

U.S. special forces eventually rescued the second downed airman following a complex operation, Trump announced on April 5.

The identities of the crew members have not yet been released.

In a statement provided to Deadline, Bay praised his “amazing partnership over [a] 30-year career working with the Department of War and amazing U.S. military members.”

Bay added that the upcoming film adaptation will celebrate “the true heroism and unwavering dedication of our service members.”

Such are the art features wrapping three recently installed arcade games — also available to play online — at the District of Columbia War Memorial in the nation’s capital, the latest protest by the anonymous group Secret Handshake, which previously made headlines in September after installing a statue on the National Mall depicting President Donald Trump holding hands and skipping with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The new installation’s game, officially called “Operation Epic Furious: Strait To Hell,” was developed as a response to the administration’s repeated use of video game footage to highlight military successes in Iran, the group told WUSA9.

One such post featured video from strikes in Iran interspersed with game footage from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The post, shared on March 6 by the White House’s official account, came just five days after six U.S. soldiers were killed by an Iranian drone strike at Kuwait’s Port of Shuaiba.

Similar posts include one featuring airstrikes alongside footage from Nintendo Wii, and another depicting a bowling alley-style “STRIKE” animation alongside war footage.

“The game features furious tweet battles against Iranian schoolgirls, low-flow shower heads, and other threats to American freedom like DEI and The Pope,” the group said in a statement to the local CBS affiliate. “And just to save you time, the only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand. But it’s The Middle East, so you also can’t win either.”

Photos were shared across social media Tuesday of National Guard members deployed to Washington, D.C., checking out the games at the memorial, which is adjacent to the National Mall.

Next to the arcade-style games installed at the memorial is a plaque that states, “The Trump administration knows that the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game, that’s why they’ve been pumping out the ‘sickest’ Iran War video game hype reels,” according to WUSA9.

“But why stop at clips when you could go full throttle Introducing Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, a high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn’t debated, it’s deployed. No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism. Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end.”

The series is built around a covert government agency monitoring giant monsters called Titans. It stars father and son Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell as different-era versions of the same Army officer — a soldier’s soldier who spends decades watching the brass refuse to take a threat seriously until it’s too late.

The story is fiction, obviously. But as anyone who’s sat through a joint readiness exercise knows, the scariest scenario is always the one nobody planned for. So, let’s run the tape.

The first problem is command authority. Under the current National Response Framework, a catastrophic domestic incident triggers a cascade of federal coordination flowing from local authorities up through FEMA, with the Defense Department stepping in for Defense Support of Civil Authorities. It’s a system built for hurricanes, mass casualty events and CBRN -chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear- incidents.

A 300-foot amphibious creature leveling a coastal city technically checks the “catastrophic” box. Still, the chain of command for a threat that moves under its own power, does not respond to law enforcement, and cannot be detained pending arraignment is untested at best.

In a real monster scenario, U.S. Northern Command would likely assume the lead for any domestic Titan event. The command has been quietly expanding its homeland defense footprint, with new component activations as recently as this past January. That’s encouraging, unless the thing you’re defending against walked right out of the ocean and into downtown Los Angeles. At that point, the question of what active-duty troops are actually authorized to do on U.S. soil becomes considerably more urgent.

The second problem is weapons. The U.S. military’s most powerful non-nuclear conventional munition is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-buster delivered exclusively by B-2 Spirit bombers. It can punch through roughly 200 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating. According to Scientific American, the weapon saw its first real-world combat use last year against hardened nuclear facilities in Iran.

The GBU-57 is, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary piece of engineering. It is also a weapon designed to destroy static targets. A Titan-class threat that can absorb a fuel-air explosion and keep moving rewrites the targeting calculus entirely. Missiles, artillery, carrier air wings: all work against a threat that can be fixed, tracked, and killed inside a standard engagement envelope. A creature that is in the bunker presents a problem that the current inventory was not designed to solve.

The third problem is the kill chain. Even if you could hurt the brute, authorizing the strike would be a bureaucratic event horizon.

Nuclear release authority is well-defined. Authority to conduct a sustained kinetic campaign against a living organism the size of a skyscraper in a populated coastal city would involve rules of engagement, collateral damage estimates, environmental review, and at least one congressional staffer asking if the move requires an Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Pick your favorite bottleneck.

The “Monarch” universe eventually arrives at the uncomfortable conclusion that the military is not the main effort: Containment is. The joint force is extraordinary at destroying thingsbut it is considerably less adept at managing them.

The season finale drops May 1 on Apple TV+.

So is the U.S. military prepared to fight a Kaiju? The answer is a firm “probably not” – but they’re going to try anyway.

Close drew on his own family to find the character. His cousin served multiple tours in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as a special forces member, and one conversation stuck with him.

“He said he had to go back on his third tour because he didn’t feel safe at home,” Close told Military Times. “He felt more comfortable being in situations like Kandahar because he knew who the people were around him. He knew how to behave.”

That kind of detail is exactly what writer-director Aaron Davidman was after. A first-time feature director, Davidman spent years traveling the country talking to people about guns, violence and the cost of military service before writing the script.

A conversation with a former Army captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade became the seed of the story.

“He just impressed me with the real layered, nuanced, complex relationship to service, firearms, healing, reintegration,” Davidman said. “I decided to focus a story on a guy like that. What would it be like to follow a trained warrior and a reintegration through their eyes, through the experience of the veteran?”

The result is a film that resists the chest-pounding war movie template.

Slinger comes home from Afghanistan wounded and estranged from his young son, adrift in a country he trained to protect but no longer recognizes himself in. The film examines how, for some veterans, post-traumatic stress disorder and reintegration grief don’t manifest dramatically, but instead quietly erode a person from the inside.

Co-stars Joanne Kelly and Gilbert Owuor round out the film’s central trio, each character at a different point on the road back. Owuor said the dynamic mirrored something true about group identity and the loneliness that can live inside it.

“When you look closer and start to examine the different members in the group, you realize that even for them, that can start to break down depending on where you are in the journey,” he said. “And I think that’s a very scary place to find yourself.”

Kelly drew on her own family, as well, including a cousin who deployed four times to Afghanistan as a nurse. The preparation opened a conversation between them that had never happened before.

“I think it was one of the things I love about this job, the constant learning about humans, about different lives,” Kelly said.

Davidman has partnered with impact agency Picture Motion to build post-screening discussions into the release. It’s a deliberate response to the isolation the film depicts, and to a broader cultural moment the filmmakers believe demands a quieter kind of conversation than the one usually surrounding guns and military service.

“We’re not holding a screening, we’re convening,” he said.

For Davidman, the most revealing research didn’t come from one-on-one interviews but from watching veterans talk to each other.

“Watching these brothers and sisters share their stories, and they may not have even served at the same time or in the same branches, but there was a shorthand that was so informative,” he said.

That earned specificity shows on screen. “American Solitaire” doesn’t reduce its protagonist to a symbol. Slinger is a man trying to figure out who he is once the structure that defined him is gone, a challenge researchers and clinicians have long identified as among the hardest parts of coming home.

“I hope that people feel there is an accurate portrayal of veterans and of three-dimensional human beings going through real experiences,” Close said, “and that they can relate and feel less alone.”

“American Solitaire” opens in select theaters Friday and is coming to VOD at a future date. More information at americansolitairefilm.com.

In the post, the clip kicks off a high-energy mashup of scenes from popular movies and TV shows cut together with real-world footage of U.S. military strikes against Iran.

The video was one of six posts Friday on the White House’s social media accounts that liberally pulled snippets from popular films, TV shows, sports events and music — running the gamut from AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” to SpongeBob SquarePants — and paired the clips with footage of Operation Epic Fury.

Among them: a scene featuring Master Chief, the iconic character from the long-running “Halo” video game series. In the short clip, Master Chief says he’s “finishing this fight.”

JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. pic.twitter.com/0502N6a3rL

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026

But over the weekend, actors and others involved in some of the projects shown in the clips condemned the White House’s hype videos.

Steve Downes, the actor who voices Master Chief, in particular, was none too happy about it, and said he did not endorse the use of his voice or agree to be involved.

“I demand that the producers of this disgusting and juvenile war porn remove my voice immediately,” he posted on X on Sunday.

pic.twitter.com/JODHpTiAYo

— Steve Downes (@SteveDownes117) March 8, 2026

“Tropic Thunder” actor and director Ben Stiller also called for the video to be pulled down. A clip of Tom Cruise from the 2008 film appears in the post.

“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie,” Stiller wrote in a post on X on Friday.

Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip. We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie. https://t.co/dMQqRxxVCa

— Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) March 6, 2026

The Trump administration has often ignored calls from artists to remove their content from its messaging.

After singer Kesha posted on social media last week condemning the use of her song “Blow” in a White House video, White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote in a post on X, “All these ‘singers’ keep falling for this. This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they’re bitching about.”