When Dave Yeager stumbled upon the chamber of shiny, casino-style slot machines, he felt an instant pull. It was his first night of deployment in Seoul, South Korea, and the United States Army officer was in a bad headspace. The September 11, 2001, attacks had just happened, and he had a wife and two children under the age of 5 at home whom he missed fiercely. He felt lost.
Yeager had never seen a slot machine on a military base before—there weren’t any in the US—but he figured trying his luck couldn’t make things worse. “As I’m sitting there, the first thing I’m noticing is that my shoulders are relaxing,” Yeager remembers. “Then, I won. In that moment, all the stress, the anxiety, the pain, the hurt, the fear—it washed away.”
Pulling the slot machine’s levers felt like a salve—until they didn’t. Yeager found another room filled with slot machines at his next base. Over a period of about three months, he spiraled into what he says was a “devastating obsession” with playing the military-run casino games. He eventually drained his savings, sold his stuff, even stole from his unit. He didn’t tell anyone what was going on. “I thought no one could help me,” he says.
While not everyone who plays the slots struggles like Yeager did, a growing body of evidence indicates that veterans and service members are more likely to struggle with gambling disorders than civilians, says Shane W. Kraus, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies gambling disorders. Service members also tend to be more hesitant to seek help, out of fear of losing rank, security clearance, or being dishonorably discharged, he adds.
Not much has changed since Yeager served—in fact, within the last five years, the slot machine programs the military runs have been making increasing amounts of cash. And, some advocates say, they’re not funneling enough of what they make into education on problem gambling.
Drafted Into Debt
The Army Recreation Machine Program (ARMP) currently operates 1,889 slot machines in 79 locations abroad, including Korea, Japan, and Germany, according to Neil Gumbs, general manager, Army Recreation Machine Program (ARMP) Installation Management Command (IMCOM). The ARMP brought in $70.9 million from its slot machine operations during the 2024 fiscal year, according to a document obtained by WIRED. That year, the ARMP made $53 million in net proceeds. (The ARMP program covers slots on Army, Navy, and Marine Corps bases, while the Air Force also has their own version of the program.)
Those figures have been increasing. In the fiscal year 2023, the ARMP brought in $64.8 million in revenue, with $48.9 million in net proceeds. The year before, it made $63.1 million in revenue with net proceeds of $47.3 million, according to documents obtained through a public records request made by this reporter through the Data Liberation Project.
From October 2024 to May 2025, the ARMP’s “house” has had some solid wins. They generated about $47.7 million from players in that period, records obtained by WIRED show. Comparatively, the total return to players from October 2024 to May 2025 was about $37 million in reportable jackpots over $1,200.
In its heyday, the ARMP brought in over $100 million in revenue, per a 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), but money-in dwindled substantially between 2010 to 2020, which Gumbs attributed to “movement and reductions in force and installations.” Things began to grow again after 2020. This was partly a boost from Covid-19 boredom, along with “renewed investment in new equipment and cost/expense reductions aided in increasing entertainment on offer,” Gumbs says.
Great Job Molly Longman & the Team @ WIRED Source link for sharing this story.
