On Saturday 28th February 2026 the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran. Operation Epic Fury hit Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, and multiple other cities. Iran retaliated with missiles aimed at Israel and US military bases across the Gulf. Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE were all targeted. This is not a drill and it is not over. It is also, uncomfortably, the plot of a 23-year-old video game rated 12+ by PEGI.
Command & Conquer Generals shipped in February 2003. The world was eighteen months out from 9/11, three weeks from invading Iraq, and almost entirely convinced that the defining conflict of the coming century was a binary one. The West versus Islamic extremism. Two sides. Simple. EA Los Angeles looked at this moment and built a game with three factions, which alone puts it ahead of most foreign policy commentary from the period.
The United States faction runs on technological supremacy and orbital superweapons that require political consensus to fire. China runs on mass scale, nationalist propaganda infrastructure built directly into the game mechanics, and the institutional willingness to absorb losses that would collapse a Western government. The GLA is a non-state coalition operating in the power vacuum between the other two, with no conventional military, an ideology that survives losing territory, and a tunnel network connecting proxy conflicts across multiple theatres. A briefing paper from 2023 covering the same ground would be considered insightful.
The GLA is not one organisation and the game does not pretend it is. The sub-faction system maps this with uncomfortable precision. Dr. Thrax runs chemical weapons operations, specialising in anthrax delivery and armour-piercing toxins. Prince Kassad operates entirely through concealment, a ghost army that controls territory without occupying it visibly. Rodall Juhziz, Demo General, builds his entire doctrine around high-explosive suicide tactics and infrastructure destruction. Three commanders, three methodologies, one loose coalition held together by opposition to the other two powers rather than any shared ideology. Hezbollah ran precision missile programmes out of Lebanon while Hamas ran urban tunnel warfare out of Gaza while the Houthis closed Red Sea shipping lanes with repurposed consumer drones and Iranian missile components. Different countries, different objectives, different relationships with their sponsors. Iran was the connecting tissue – transactional, not hierarchical. Today the US struck that node directly.
Russia does not map cleanly onto any Generals faction. Russia is attempting to project superpower status while operating with the tactical logic of an asymmetric actor. Mercenary ground forces deployed with plausible deniability across four continents. Energy infrastructure used as a strategic lever. Attrition substituting for precision. Wagner Group was a GLA mechanic – disposable, deniable, filling gaps conventional forces could not occupy in Mali, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine simultaneously. China is funding none of this directly and fighting none of it at all. China is buying discounted Russian oil, selling dual-use components, and watching US ammunition stockpiles drain into Eastern Europe while the Taiwan question sits on the table. In the Generals campaign, the USA and China pursue separate objectives across the same theatre, neither coordinating nor openly conflicting, each using the GLA crisis to position against the other. The campaign models that relationship accurately: shared enemies do not produce shared interests.
The USA’s superweapon is a particle cannon fired from orbit. It wins the engagement it is aimed at and resolves nothing about the strategic situation underneath. The entire ATACMS debate – long-range missiles supplied to Ukraine with committee-approved restrictions on permissible targets – is the particle cannon problem in operational form. Enormous capability, politically hobbled, winning specific battles while the broader question of what winning means remains unanswered. Operation Epic Fury is the particle cannon at full charge. What comes after it is the rest of the campaign.
The game was accused of being provocative on release. China officially objected to their portrayal. Critics read the GLA as a blunt post-9/11 terrorism metaphor and moved on, missing the structural point entirely: that non-state violence is a symptom of great power competition, and that it operates in the space great powers create when they contest the same geography without being willing to fight each other directly. That observation was available in 2003. It took another decade of expensive practical experience before it became mainstream analysis.
Generals 2 was cancelled. It was set in 2020. The developers could see where this was going and still could not get the game made. The original is on EA App for less than the cost of a coffee. The Foreign Office should expense it on the grounds that it is cheaper than a consultant and more accurate. Though at this point, perhaps the window for consulting has passed.
Critical Moves covers strategy gaming. We did not plan to spend a Saturday writing about geopolitics. Here we are.
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