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PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy
eldavojohn writes "Disillusioned by PowerPoint at work? Some members of the US Military view it as 'an internal threat.' Marine Corps General James N. Mattis says, 'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' reaching the same conclusion NASA came to back in 2003. But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The slide causes anyone's eyes to glaze over with confusion so much that General McChrystal jokingly stated when he saw it, 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war.' At my job, I know that feeling all too well."
"PowerPoint makes us stupid"
Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
but it sure would be great if this were the beginning of the end of unnecessary PowerPoint presentations. I can't think of many times when I saw one that was actually helpful.
This ain't rocket surgery.
1. bomb Taliban positions with solar powered laptops running Windows7 with powerpoint installed ...
2. Victory
3.
4. Experience horrible unplanned of blow-back.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
That spaghetti slide has a copyright notice at the bottom, "PA Knowledge Limited 2009"
There must be a joke about oxymorons and military intelligence in here somewhere.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
A long essay on the evils of PowerPoint by the man, Ed Tufte, regarding the shuttle explosions: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Oh, man... the irony
Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
I don't think it is fair to blame this directly on Microsoft. There are, after all, other programs available today that allow you to make terrible presentations. If the talk had been done instead in Apple Keynote, OpenOffice, or any other program, it still would have been possible to make massive, mind-numbing, information-lacking, slides.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
When I was in USAF officer training, all the trainees were required to give several briefings throughout the program. We were told that we could use any visual aids we wanted (to include whiteboard, PowerPoint or... who knows.)
All 144 of us used PowerPoint, simply because it was the easiest way to complement what you were talking about.
...if PowerPoint makes you stupid, but I sure feel dumber having read that article.
"Powerpoint absorbs huge amounts of time that management, marketeers, and other suits might otherwise
spend doing real harm."
Powerpoint isn't the problem, it's large organization management and people who don't want to (or don't have the time) to get into the details..
This is the nature of "summing-up" and presenting to people that do not understand what is being spoon-fed to them.
... and it has nothing to do with the complexity of the STRATEGY.... it's meant to give commanders an indication of the insanely-complex interrelations between various factors/actions. It's actually designed to represent the SITUATION in Afghanistan and to illustrate that simple notions of cause and effect aren't quite as simple as you'd like to believe. The slide is nothing more than a model of a very complex situation.... and it's actually a damned good one too.
Check out the larger version of the picture and take a look at some of the headings.
Look at the top right of the dark blue portion, where it says "targeted strikes", if you start following some of the arrows, you see (as you should expect) that targeted strikes will have an effect on "Insurgent Damages and Casualties" and that such an effect will also have an effect on "Fear of ANSF/Coalition Repercussions", which will also have an effect on "Insurgent recruiting/manpower".
There's no description of strategy there, and if you sat down and tried to think about the repercussions of specific actions taken in an area filled with insurgents and a populace that is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes not sympathetic to both the coalition and insurgents, a lot of the interrelations would seem pretty obvious - ie. if you spend too much effort killing insurgents, you run the risk of increasing their ability to recruit, because the population will begin to fear and resent you.
Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Wow, someone needs to learn how to use GraphViz:
http://www.graphviz.org/
*avoid edge crossings and reduce edge length
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I would make note of several other crutches that should be great but are created by idiots.
Most site index engines, for an example try to find something useful on Symantec's website using their built in KB search.
Photoshop, you got to love all the "professional photographers" who simply apply the latest filter from their torrented CS.
WYSIWYG, pick any, you know what I am talking about here folks, if you don't...well you probably are part of the problem.
Social Media sites, the abuse never ends...I'm looking at you farmtown girl and political right/leftwing nutjob friends.
Any of these items should work and be great tools but there are just too many idiots in the world who dont want to put effort into anything. These people will exist whether the crutches are there or not, but they sure as heck will waste a lot less time.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
My bad - I RTFA and this is the gem in the piece:
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Reminds me of this flowchart that's supposedly about how to fire an inept NYC school teacher.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Projecting a diagram onto a screen does not make the diagram a PowerPoint slide. The complexity of that diagram has nothing to do with PowerPoint.
The problem is in the first statement. You don't understand.
This is some RTS game on a limited map. In an active engagement, US troops are more than a match for insurgents. But when the enemy can hide anywhere and more anywhere, you must defend everywhere. You need a force that can counter them anywhere they might appear. Hence, you need a much bigger force.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
I think the point of that slide is to show that the war is complex and judging by the laughing it worked. It's basically like Primer in this XKCD comic, the point is not is understand the picture but to see that its very complex.
"Sometimes the situation or mission is complicated."
Killing Afghanis for employment and profit, while hiding the true nature of what is being done is very complicated. The slide shows that perfectly.
This is the real underlying issue: If Afghanistan can be made safe, an oil company can become very rich by building an oil pipeline from the interior of Russia to Pakistan. A side issue is that weapons sales and war contracting are easy money. (It is the employees of the war contractors who are killed.)
To those who want to make money, killing poor and relatively defenseless people is just a cost of doing business. Especially since the U.S. taxpayer pays the cost.
"... incapable leadership and poor communication..."
Exactly.
PowerPoint exposes how stupid we already are.
Basically, it isn't "PowerPoint makes us stupid", it is "Stupid people make us use PowerPoint". But that's true in some ways about the entire suite of MS Office products:
* You haven't worked in an enterprise environment until you've been forced to use MS Excel worksheets as database tables, by managers of the kind who use a $2 calculator to work out the solution before typing that solution into the cell. As these "tables" become unwieldy they are augmented by elabourate macros crafted by the boss' secretary (secretaries wield Excel like witches yield black magic).
* All documentation must be authored in MS Word, even 1000 page technical tomes where Word is ill-suited for the task. All doumentation must be passed around via email, until it clogs the server and someone comes up with the idea of an intranet portal (perhaps even Sharepoint! ooooh! aaaah!). Corporate intranet turns into 90%+ .doc content.
* The more forward-thinking bosses realise that MS Excel is not a database (perhaps because their pet .xls file hit the 65k row limits before Excel 2007 was released). Stupid non-normalised tables imported straight from Excel into Access. Secretary learns how to build even more amazingly byzantine forms and macros, and eventually a whole department relies on a creaky Access .mdb on a network drive with no security where a dozen people run giant queries on un-indexed columns where a proper database server would be more appropriate.
And of course, the whole thing must be supported by an IT person who had no role in crafting this mess.
Powerpoint wasn't designed to make people stupid. Just like the rest of MS Office, it has been comandeered by idiots and forced to their mind-numbing bidding. MSFT products may be low in efficiency and reliability, high on resource consumption and vendor lock-in but they are quite easy to pick up even if they lack the "taste" on famous Steve seems to crave. ON one hand it has helped bring computing to the masses. The other edge of that sword is that it has enabled the semi-literate to misapply all of those applications with minimal effort.
A classic: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg