Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Story Of One Colonel's Frustration With The Pentagon's Power Point Presentations



Tell Us How You Really Feel, Colonel -- Foreign Policy

As a general rule, when serving military officers decide to place their opinions on the public record, they write in hyper-cautious military-speak that appears designed to conceal any sort of original insight. So thank you, Col. Lawrence Sellin, for being an exception to the rule. Sellin, a staff officer in ISAF Joint Command in Kabul, sounds like he had a Very Bad Day at the office, and then returned home to pen a screed against the work being done at headquarters.

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death.

Read more ....

Update:
Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant -- Danger Room

My Comment: The video is priceless.

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