Strategy would not seem to be Donald Rumsfeld’s strong suit.

Despite that, the former Dubya Defense Secretary marshaled his forces and created an app for a strategic video game called “Churchill Solitaire,” based on actual card game played incessantly during WWII by the British Prime Minister. If you’re picturing an ill-tempered, computer-illiterate senior barking orders into a Dictaphone, then you’ve already figured out Rumsfeld’s creative process. At least tens of thousands of people were not needlessly killed during the making of the app.

From Julian E. Barnes at the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Rumsfeld can’t code. He doesn’t much even use a computer. But he guided his young digitally minded associates who assembled the videogame with the same method he used to rule the Pentagon—a flurry of memos called snowflakes.

As a result, “Churchill Solitaire” is likely the only videogame developed by an 83-year-old man using a Dictaphone to record memos for the programmers.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld was known for not mincing words with his memos. Age hasn’t mellowed him.

“We need to do a better job on these later versions. They just get new glitches,” reads one note from Mr. Rumsfeld. “[W]e ought to find some way we can achieve steady improvement instead of simply making new glitches.”

Other notes were arguably more constructive, if still sharply worded.

“Instead of capturing history, it is getting a bit artsy,” he wrote in one snowflake in which he suggested ways to make the game better evoke Churchill—including scenes from World War II and quotes from the prime minister, changes that made it into the final game.•

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“One of the strangest interviews I’ve ever done.”