“Today I think of my projects as an artist who is working with the perspective of a photo archivist – thinking ahead to a war photography archive in 50 years and anticipating what gaps there would be in that archive, and seeking to anticipate and eliminate critical gaps in the record,” he says. With this understanding Sims set forth to create Theater of War, an extraordinary document of the pretend villages used for U.S. military training wherein soldiers engage with newly arrived émigrés from Afghanistan and Iraq in mock battles.