Elmore has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but growing up in a family with limited means meant his family had to ration paper, he said in a conversation with Fort Knox Public Affairs Office reporter Savannah Baird.

When Elmore was drafted into the Army after graduating with a fine arts degree from Western Kentucky University, the service gave him the resources to hone his craft, he told Baird.

“Once I got assigned, the Army saw my portfolio and realized I could draw just about anything from memory, so they put me on illustration work,” Elmore said in the release.

The Army changed the look of its field manuals in the 1970s to include more illustrations, and Elmore’s talents were put to use. After studying objects, Elmore could retain their images and draw them from memory, including tanks and rifles, he told Baird.

“It was a God-given gift and I used it,” he said.

Elmore went to basic training and was stationed at Fort Knox. During his time there, he developed skills he had not learned in college.

“Illustrations in the ’70s were just line work, pure ink — white and black, no grays — and they didn’t teach you that in college. I developed those skills at Fort Knox,” he said in the release.

After completing his two-year obligation, Elmore decided to stay on as a contractor, Baird reported. Around that time, a new employee joined the staff and introduced the team to Dungeons & Dragons, changing Elmore’s life.

Despite his initial hesitation, he began playing the game with his coworkers and quickly became hooked, calling it “the king of all games.”

Dungeons & Dragons was relatively new at the time, and its art was elementary, Elmore told Baird. He recalled that a fellow artist said he was going to submit his artwork to Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons, because “our art is much better than this.”

Elmore then decided to submit his own portfolio to TSR, which included drawings he had produced for the Army. Soon after, TSR offered to double his salary, hire his wife and move them to Wisconsin, the release stated.

Elmore said he immediately shook the company representative’s hand and told him, “you just bought yourself an artist.”

He went on to create one of the most recognizable images in the game’s history: the cover art for the famous “Red Box” set, which featured a warrior in combat with a red dragon.

After six years at TSR, Elmore decided to move back to Central Kentucky and pursue freelance work for another 40 years, according to the Army’s release.

He recognizes the impact the Army had on his career as an artist.

“I was very lucky,” he said in the release. “Sometimes, I think to be successful you have to be good, but you got to have some of those weird breaks in life — and I got two or three.”

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.

But as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is easy to forget that independence was not guaranteed. As they shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1778, George Washington and his troops would have scoffed at the notion that victory would come on a silver platter.

For the American Revolution to succeed, the colonists had to create an army. Whether the Continental Army was defeated on the battlefield — as it frequently was — mattered less. As long as the United Colonies could keep an army in the field, Britain would be forced to continue what seemed like a forever war.

“American Revolutionary War” is a computer wargame that depicts the battles of the American Revolution, or what the British call the War of American Independence.

With 148 scenarios, from small engagements like Hubbardton and Kettle Creek, to larger battles such as Princeton, Brandywine and Saratoga, American Revolutionary War is part of publisher Wargame Design Studio’s Musket & Pike series. These games depict warfare from the 15th through the 18th Centuries, an era where polearms were gradually replaced by gunpowder weapons, such as muskets.

By the 1770s, the pike had been replaced by the bayonet, and the primitive arquebus by more reliable flintlock muskets including Britain’s “Brown Bess.”

With a 114-page user manual, American Revolutionary War is not exactly casual entertainment. It is a highly detailed simulation not just of 18th Century European-style warfare — but also how difficult it was to conduct armies’ European-style warfare in the 18th Century North American wilderness.

The game depicts battles at the grand tactical scale, with battalions and companies of infantry, as well as batteries of artillery and the occasional horse soldier (cavalry was much rarer than the later Napoleonic and American Civil Wars). The American have Continental regulars and local militia, while the Crown fields a polyglot force of British regulars, German mercenaries, Loyalist troops and Native American allies.

These units maneuver across a 2-D hex-grid map of eastern North America in its pre-industrial glory. The terrain is studded with forests, fields, marshes and streams.

Units are rated for how many troops or guns they have, and their weaponry (musket, 3-pounder artillery, etc.). Most important is a quality rating from A to F, which affects combat proficiency and movement. The British regulars tend to be quality As and Bs, while the Continentals tend to be Cs and Ds, and the American militias Fs.

Players alternate taking their turns, with each turn representing about 15 minutes of real time. Each player conducts movement and fire combat, followed by a melee phase to resolve assaults. Combat inflicts casualties as well as “fatigue,” which saps morale and effectiveness until units break or rout.

Western battlefield tactics in the 18th and 19th Centuries centered on assuming the right formation in an era when troops fought shoulder to shoulder. Column formation was used to expedite movement, though at the cost of firepower and presenting a juicy target. When engaging in a firefight, infantry would assume line formation, standing in two or three ranks.

Units in line that move through rough terrain, or obstructions, such as walls, run the risk of becoming “disordered,” with movement and fire penalties. On the other hand, a densely packed column can take heavy casualties from enemy troops deployed in line. Dispersing troops into open order makes them less vulnerable to enemy fire, but penalizes them in melee.

One myth is that the conflict “was fought by the British in a strictly linear fashion, while the Americans were primarily in skirmish,” Mike Cox, designer of American Revolutionary War, told Military Times. Both sides were capable of assuming a variety of formations, though this presented challenges for under-trained Continentals.

“The Americans often tried to fight linearly, too,” added Cox. “It just didn’t often work out well.”

Particularly useful are the detachments of light infantry.

“Learning to master your light troops is extremely important,” Cox said. “When to deploy as skirmishers to delay or scout, or recall and use them to effectively melee to push back the enemy and take and hold ground.”

Command and control has always been the glue that binds armies, but especially so in the pre-radio era, when commanders personally led their troops.

American Revolutionary War features historical commanders, rated from A (George Washington) to F, that form chains of command in each army. Leaders can rally broken troops and provide morale bonuses, though they can also be felled by enemy fire.

“Keeping units in range of their leader and their leader in range of the next higher echelon makes an army work well,” Cox explained. American commanders will need to stay close to their militia: “Keeping them in command and preventing their disruption and breakdown is an art.”

One fascination of playing historical wargames is seeing how they model the little things. For example, the British Army’s Scottish Highlanders are given a bonus during melee combat “to reflect their impact on the minds of American troops, and their reputation for relishing close combat,” the game manual notes.

But ultimately, the question comes down to: How accurately does the game depict the battles that determined the fate of the American Revolution? And, how well does it capture the essences of a professional army versus a more amateur — but also more inspired — citizen army?

American Revolutionary War fares well on both questions.

The unit quality, morale and command systems model the capabilities of both sides, including how the Continental Army improved over time due to combat experience, as well as the tutelage of European instructors like Baron von Steuben.

“British forces are often outnumbered,” said Cox. “They need to learn to stretch their lines or get outflanked. They will usually have some high-quality troops and have the advantage of picking the point of attack.”

“The Americans usually have a high number of units. However, quality and strength can vary wildly. The Americans need to know when to give ground and when to hit hard.”

Perhaps what is most striking is the theater of war.

WDS has published almost 120 historical wargames that cover gigantic battles, such as Waterloo, Gettysburg, Kursk and the Battle of the Bulge. In these games, the maps are packed with masses of troops.

In American Revolutionary War, the maps are often big, while the armies are small. One can begin to appreciate how British soldiers and colonial settlers must have felt about fighting in a vast, untamed land.

As Americans mark the Declaration of Independence, this is a reminder of how far our nation has come.

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.

View this post on Instagram

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.

It’s the standard that leaders cite, programs are built around and progress is measured against. But a recently published report reveals that the Department of Defense has been calculating unemployment differently from typical benchmarks, overstating unemployment rates and obscuring how many military spouses may have stopped looking for work entirely.

A March 2026 report revealed that the DoD calculates unemployment differently than the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, counting some spouses as unemployed who would typically be seen as out of the workforce.

The Pentagon attributes these differences to unique military lifestyle factors. However, according to economist and professor Amy Burnett Cross, this difference in calculation “makes these measures not comparable.”

In fact, if the Pentagon mirrored federal standards, the military spouse unemployment rate would drop from roughly 20% to 14% — still significantly higher than the national average, but lower than the figure cited for years in congressional testimony, policy discussions and news coverage.

Cross believes this “structurally inflates” military spouse unemployment while simultaneously reducing the number of spouses categorized as no longer participating in the workforce, a group rarely highlighted in DoD programming efforts and reports.

“I remember penny pinching so, so much in those days,” recalled Army spouse Elizabeth Mays of her husband’s first duty station in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. “I ended up taking a job making minimum wage at Sears in the shoe department, just to help us make ends meet.”

This was the first of many times Mays worked outside her field to remain employed. Subsequent duty stations yielded similar employment choices.

“Between commuting and then the workday, you’re spending 13 hours a day away from your newborn baby, and your husband is deployed and not even there at all. It’s just me,” said Mays.

She did the math and realized that after child care and transportation costs, her income wouldn’t cover her expenses. In fact, remaining in the workforce would “cost” her family $50 a week. “Those decisions did not make sense, and that was the point where I chose family.”

Mays’ experience is familiar to many military spouses, but it is an experience that is not well understood. Mays is not part of the roughly 20% of military spouses who are unemployed, those who are looking for work but not finding it. She is part of the roughly 36% of spouses who are not in the workforce at all.

“Anecdotally, I would say that we have a pretty large percentage of spouses that have removed themselves from the workforce,” said Eddy Mentzer, who oversaw child care family programs and spouse employment for the DoD. “They’re not captured in any way whatsoever.”

The lack of information on military spouses who have stopped looking for work may undercut the programs designed to help them.

Patricia Barron served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Military Community and Family Policy under President Biden from 2021 to 2025. Her office oversaw military spouse employment programming and collaborated with the Pentagon’s Office of People Analytics to survey military spouses.

“A question that I have always had to our researchers at DoD … ‘Are we asking the right questions?’” said Barron.

The answer she often received was that changing survey questions would hamper the department’s ability to track trends over time.

“There’s always, I would say, good reasoning for the pushback [to update surveys], but it keeps us stuck where we are,” she said. “There’s got to be a new way to think about the [spouse survey], and maybe it’s time to blow it up.”

For many military spouses, cycling in and out of the workforce is expected, even if it isn’t clearly documented or understood.

Upon discovering she was pregnant with their first child, Navy spouse Melinda Estrada made a plan to navigate her budding career in tech. She would work on her graduate degree while staying home with her new baby.

“And then once that’s done, then I’ll jump from my graduate degree, hopefully, to a full-time position,” said Estrada.

Because her husband’s assignment to attend school in Monterey, California, was only supposed to last 18 months, she didn’t see a point in looking for a job only to have to step away without the accrued work time required to be entitled to maternity leave.

A second child and increasing demands from her husband’s job delayed her graduate degree further, extending her time out of the workforce.

Mays, too, struggled to reenter the workforce.

“In Germany, I tried to go back to work,” said Mays, whose husband received overseas orders in 2014, moving her and her two children, ages two and four, far from family and friends.

Because there were limited jobs available overseas, she applied for a job outside her field, at a bank on the installation.

“They told me that they chose another candidate because they were going to be there longer than me,” she said.

Undeterred, she applied to work in merchandising at the Army Exchange and was hired after having to wait 15 months for her daughter to be old enough to be eligible for a spot in daycare.

“I came back from my first day on the job with training, and my husband said, ‘So, I have news.’ Our favorite phrase,” Mays recalled. “‘I have been selected for a job in D.C., and we have to move in 90 days.’”

Mays wanted to work, but resigned the following day, exiting the workforce.

Historically, DoD surveys have asked spouses if they “wanted to work.” As of 2019, the vast majority of those spouses, 85%, responded yes, but only 43% were employed.

This question was not included in the 2021 or 2024 surveys. However, recent DoD surveys have asked why spouses are not looking for work, allowing them to select only one answer. The Number 1 answer (30%) cited child care responsibilities.

Child care scarcity is a reality for all Americans, and military child care is no different.

According to a 2025 report by RAND, military child care programs are not keeping up with demand, leaving tens of thousands of military families without care.

The availability of affordable child care has a significant impact on military spouses’ participation in the workforce. According to a 2016 Health and Human Services report, a 10% reduction in the price of child care could increase maternal employment as high as 11%.

Despite the documented need for improved child care access, most military spouse employment solutions have focused on reducing unemployment through personal development and employment partnerships.

“The DoD has thrown money at trying to find employers who are willing to hire military spouses because people don’t want to hire people who are moving all the time,” said Maria Donnelly, the co-founder of the Military Family Foundation, a nonprofit that has helped military spouses navigate federal employment policies.

Donnelly was referring to one of the DoD’s employment solutions, the Military Spouse Employment Partnership, or MSEP, a membership-based program that encourages civilian employers to hire military spouses.

Since MSEP was launched in 2011, “more than 220,000 military spouses” have been hired. While the initiative requires its partners to document those they hire and retain, this data has not yet been publicly reported.

Both Estrada and Mays reported taking advantage of DoD-sponsored career development programs and internships. Neither walked away with jobs as a direct result of participating, but both formed networking connections that ultimately led to employment. For Estrada, another workforce departure followed.

In January 2026, the DoD announced an effort to reduce military spouse unemployment by 5%, increase Military Spouse Employment Partnership retention to 100% and establish a new military spouse unemployment office.

If experts are correct that the military is measuring unemployment differently than the rest of the country, it raises questions about whether current policies are targeting the right problem.

“I try not to should myself,” said Mays, who is currently employed by a military spouse-owned business that offers flexible remote work, a job she is thankful to have. “But I have this feeling and that I could and should be like at a director level or a management level, given my level of experience.”

Estrada is still looking for work.

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.”