Editorial
About OP-FOR: What This Site Covers, and How It Is Written
A reference for people who need to understand the armed forces from outside them: applicants, families, veterans, journalists, and anyone trying to read a document written in an institutional language.
OP-FOR is a reference publication about the armed forces of the United States. It covers the things that are hard to find out from outside the institution and that matter most to people making decisions: what a job code actually involves, what a rank structure means in practice, what an allowance covers and what it does not, how a chain of command is supposed to work, and what the vocabulary means when nobody stops to explain it.
The name is written OP-FOR and OPFOR both ways, and it is a term before it is a name: an opposing force is the unit that plays the enemy so a training exercise has one.
The audience is deliberately broad and mostly the same in one respect: people encountering the institution from the outside. An applicant deciding between two career fields. A parent trying to understand what basic training is and what it is not. A spouse working out what a permanent change of station involves. A veteran reading an entitlement letter. A journalist checking what a term means before using it. None of them need a defence-policy essay; all of them need one specific thing explained properly.
How the material is written
Three rules do most of the work, and they are worth stating because they explain why some pages contain less than a reader might expect.
Structure over figures. How something is organised changes slowly; the numbers attached to it change every year. A page that explains how a housing allowance is determined (by location, grade and dependent status, paid as an allowance instead of a reimbursement) is useful for a decade. A page that prints this year's rate is wrong within twelve months and looks authoritative while being wrong. Where a current figure is needed, the page names the body that publishes it: the Defense Finance and Accounting Service for pay, the Defense Travel Management Office for allowance rates, the Department of Veterans Affairs for entitlements.
The gap is the content. The most useful thing about a great many military terms is the difference between how they are used in conversation and what they mean in a regulation. People make decisions on the conversational meaning and are then held to the regulatory one. Where that gap exists, it is stated plainly instead of smoothed over.
No manufactured certainty. A recruiting outcome, a clearance decision, a reclassification request and a medical waiver all depend on circumstances a website cannot know. Pages here describe how the process works and what generally decides it, and stop short of predicting an individual result. Anywhere a claim would need a source that does not exist, the claim is left out.
Editorial position
The material is independent reference writing, and it is written for a reader who has to make a decision rather than for one who has to be persuaded. Several pages exist because a process is harder in practice than a summary of it suggests: what a contract commits, which parts of a training pipeline fail people, how long a clearance really takes. Where a page carries a figure, the figure comes from the authority that publishes it and the page says which authority that is.
Where a subject is genuinely contested — force structure, procurement, doctrine — the disagreement is described as a disagreement, with the stronger form of each argument, and the reader is left to form a view. That is less satisfying to read and considerably more useful to someone who has to form their own.
Sources and corrections
Material is written from published sources: service publications and regulations, official career-field descriptions, congressional and departmental reporting, and reference works for historical subjects. Where a page relies on a specific source, it is listed on the page. Where a figure is genuinely disputed, the range is given and not a false midpoint.
Errors are handled as corrections and not as silent edits: a page that was wrong about a training length, an eligibility rule or a career progression is fixed at the point of error, and where the change alters a figure a reader may have relied on, the page says what changed. A reference page that quietly rewrites itself is less trustworthy than one that shows its work.
Questions and answers
Who writes for OP-FOR?
The reference sections are written and maintained by the editorial team as opposed to credited to individual bylines. That is a deliberate choice for material of this kind: a glossary entry or a job-code profile is maintained over years by whoever is working on that section, and a byline would imply a single author and a fixed date that neither is true.
Where does a binding answer come from?
A recruiter, a chain of command, a service personnel office, or the published regulation itself. This is a reference: it explains how those systems work, what the published figures are and which authority issues them, so a reader knows what to ask and can recognise an answer that does not fit the rules. A page here is the preparation for that conversation, not a substitute for it.
How current is the information?
The structural material (how a chain of command works, what a career field is, how the rank system is organised) changes slowly and is stable. Figures that change annually, such as pay tables and allowance rates, are deliberately not reproduced here, because a stale number presented confidently is worse than no number at all. Pages point to the durable structure and say where the current figure is published.
How are errors corrected?
At the point of error, and as corrections rather than as silent edits: a page that describes a training pipeline or an eligibility rule incorrectly can cost someone a real decision, so it is fixed on the page and the change is stated where it alters a figure a reader may have relied on. Corrections reach the page through the editorial process rather than through a submission form, and the privacy notice says the same: there are no comment forms, no contact forms and no accounts anywhere on the site.