I was only able to find contact information for one person who I knew was probably technical (from their posts), so I sent it to them.
I never learned the "other side" of this story, but a few years later the same dev team tried to recruit me at a CS contest, to which I politely declined.
More details: I was young, without credit card, and gaming on a mac. AA was free and mac compatible. For a while -- apparently mac ports of unreal engine games were approximately all done by a single very productive contractor and from what I understand the US Army, uhh, stopped paying him at some point. So he stopped releasing the mac ports. From my point of view, this meant that I could only play with other mac users and couldn't use any of the fancy new maps. Logs indicated that the compatibility problems with the new maps were not particularly deep, so I got to parsing the unreal map files and was able to restore compatibility by deleting the offending objects. I implemented texture decoding/encoding mostly for curiosity and because textures were well documented in the reverse engineering "literature." I imagined a workflow where someone would bulk export and re-import textures and aside from the texture names the one piece of metadata I needed was the format: RGBA (uncompressed) or DXT (compressed)? I realized that I could easily identify DXT compression from the image histogram, so I didn't need to store separate metadata. Nifty! But it didn't work. Lots of textures stored in uncompressed RGBA8888 "erroneously" round-tripped to DXT. After poring over my own code, I eventually realized that this was because on many of the textures someone had enabled DXT compression and then disabled it, dropping the texture quality to that of DXT while bloating the texture size to that of RGBA8888 (other textures were still stored as DXT, so compression itself was still working). I wrote a quick tool to add up the wasted space from storing DXT compressed textures in uncompressed RGB format and it came out to about half the total disk space, both before and after the top level installer's lossless compression. They could have re-enabled compression on most of the textures where they had disabled it without loss in quality, and if they had wanted a list of such textures I would have been able to provide it, but it didn't go down that way. When I shared what happened with my father, who had served, his reaction was "Now that's the Army I know!"