We Have Met The Enemy And He Is PowerPoint

By Elisabeth Bumiller
New York Times
April 27, 2010
Pg. 1

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay.The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.

“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.

In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.

President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.

No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

You couldn't include a link, could you?

Nevertheless,  I THINK that the PowerPoint page in question is this:

Ha!  I bet you by 2 seconds!







CJ

Death by Powerpoint is the cause of most non-combat deaths in the military.

And you gotta know the guy that made that slide was proud as hell.



 

I bet I know exactly how that slide was presented:

"Now, I know this is a busy slide..." *note how presenter has mastered the use of understatement* "...Can you folks in the back can read it?" *blithely ignores the fact that they can't* "Good!  I know it's busy, but there are just a couple of things I want you to get from this..." *proceeds to read the entire slide in a monotone while waving a laser pointer in all directions as though it would help*

That particular chart would have been much better laid out as a flowchart.   It might even then be somewhat comprehensible.





CJ

Well glory be.  Someone finally took notice.

Seems like the military is handling politics more than breaking things and killing people.

This is what the founders meant by avoiding foreign entanglements.

Gulf War 1 was won by a dang College football play.

And we wonder why it is taking so long to pull off these two wars?

Vietnam, part 2?

Not that I think that reporters at these briefings have much value, but what's the point, then?

General McChrystal has just slammed SIX SIGMA and ALL the Black Belt drivel!

I bow down to you General!
You are the one true GOD!

Dog and pony man. Dog and pony.

They need quad charts

Flowchart bukakke

wonder how many 100K of our tax dollars  the outside consulting firm was paid to create that thing

My EMT instructor referred to power point as a great way waste an hour conveying 10 minutes worth of information.

"...no bastard ever won a war by making powerpoint slides for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard make powerpoint slides for his country."

This.

What a mess. And people think it is a black and white situation over there.

Wow, it's more confusing than the California assault weapons flowchart.  

 

 

Why is that laid out in such a messy fashion. I hope we didn't pay anyone to do that...

http://tinyurl.com/2gx4kca

Find the guy who made that slide, and put him in charge of something.





 

It wouldn't have been so bad if you didn't have to click the mouse to make each arc appear.

The prevailing feeling among the military is that the reporters have already decided what they're going to say, so it doesn't really matter what you tell them.



 

That's what makes McCrystals statement so poignant is that he's right.  If we could really know and understand that graph, we've won the war.



 

This is going into my next powerpoint presentation.

 

A flow chart implies that the process is linear.  Which, in this case, it very much is not.



 

Damned right.



I can also attest to the time wasted on freakin' formatting. Editing a paper is easy. You change words. I've spent far too much work time trying to get fucking Powerpoint formatting right. I just spent ten minutes fixing a "-" to be the right size and width and in the right place because if I didn't somebody would bitch. Not about the information, but about the goddamn dash.



I hate powerpoint. Real honest to god papers convey more information and aren't making me blind.

This is my shocked face

We have not had a good DBPP session since I became a TL. When I was a regular joe I could at least stay awake by cracking smart ass remarks and doing pushups for them.

Now I have to set a good example.

It would be really funny if this wasn't my country's military

Feel free to expand on your statement.

Not in the military, but that powerpoint idiocy has spread to my field as well.

ETA:  It is darn near the epitome of a "form over substance" culture, in my experience.

My design professor used powerpoint to prove a point to us once. He gave a 30 minute speech on absolute bullshit, all theory was wrong, all numbers were wrong, all equations were wrong. We all bought into it, and thought it was legit mainly because of the awesome powerpoint that was with it.  Only after he told us that everything was impossible.

 










 

10+ years ago when I was AD, you could tell who didn't have a 'real' job because of their elaborate PPT presentations and esp goofy slide transitions.

Crap took hours to make.

Me?
White text on a blue background.

Add to that mIRC on the INTEL/OPS side...this war (and the one in Iraq) are being run by a bunch of kids (no offense meant) sending text messages to each other...literally.

Wonder why the General was so harsh..after all that's WORKING DRAFT v3 he saw...I'm sure they'll clean it up by v12 or so.

Should have done it in 3D.

Indeed.  If we had the Taliban and AQ making PPT slides for their CoC's this thing would be overwith by now.

I guess they DIDN'T show him the slides on AAFES concessions and how much the service members like/need them.

Oh, well, standby for all of the unintended consequences.

Hahahaha