US military strategy on Afghanistan - a rare example of PowerPoint complexity
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”
That’s what General Stanley McChrystal, leader of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, reportedly said when shown this PowerPoint slide in Kabul a year ago.
If the slide, titled ‘Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics – Security’, had been intended to show the complexity of US military strategy, it presumably succeeded admirably.
It was certainly a change from the usual bang-bang bulletpointing and straight-line simplicity of many PowerPoint presentations.
It looks as if President Obama’s July 2011 date for starting to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is optimistic. Referring to these plans, a senior Administration said: “There’s some evidence that reminds us that this is not going to be a straight line of progress. It’s probably best described as zigs and zags.” (NYT report of 14 June 2010).
Indeed, but the problem is that the PP presentations said to have invaded military activities usually omit the complexities and the zigs and zags.
Old-fashioned human speech
When British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was touring Afghanistan earlier this year, he was shown a nicely bulletpointed, tidily optimistic slideshow about the battle for hearts and minds in Helmand. This upbeat show left him and his party with their morales boosted – until an official with knowledge of the region (that owes nothing to PP slideshows) summarised the situation in Helmand in the joined-up phrases of fluent human speech. In brief, he made it clear that Helmand was a disaster.
No doubt, PP is useful for gung-ho military men and can-do corporate communicators with a liking for bullets and bulletpoints. But one wonders how far the way it encourages over-simplification and excludes elusive complexities and nuances leads to disastrous military and corporate decision-making.
PP is one of those many tools and techniques that normally intelligent people have allowed to get out of control in a way that stupefies us and leads us into trouble. The ubiquitous slideshow, it seems, does not lead only to a dimming of the lights.
General McChrystal apparently is treated to two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul every day. In so far as these bulletpointed briefings simplify things, they must lead to military mistakes, which tend to be quite costly. ‘Death by PowerPoint’ is probably a literal reality.
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Have you ever bored an audience stupid with a PowerPoint presentation?
I think I may have done so once or twice – not because the presentation was especially awful, but because I packed in too much and went on too long.
Anyway, according to General James N Mattis of the US Marine Corps, PowerPoint can not only bore people stupid, but “makes us stupid”.
He managed to say that – without the help of PowerPoint – at a military conference in North Carolina recently.
Dangerous illusions
Another US military man, Brigadier General HR McMaster, said of PowerPoint: “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bulletizable.”
No? Does he mean you can’t explain all the complexities and nuances of the Middle Eastern conflict with a rigid list of seven bulletpoints?
Apparently not. “If you divorce war from all of that,” he said, “it becomes a targeting exercise.”
When leading the campaign to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, McMaster banned PP presentations. But junior officers — otherwise known as PowerPoint Rangers — are still kept busy preparing daily presentations.
Winning the war with PowerPoint
In January 2009, the website Company Command asked US army commanders and platoon leaders in Iraq what they spent most of their time doing. One officer, Lt Sam Nuxoll, said: “Making PowerPoint slides”.
When pressed, he added: “I’m dead serious, guys. The one thing I spend more time on than anything else here in combat is making PowerPoint slides. I have to make a storyboard [a PP presentation] complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens. Recon a water pump? Make a storyboard. Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
(Some people might think that keeping US forces busy preparing PP presentations all day long would be a good thing, since it would deflect them from their “targeting exercises”.)
Captain Crispin Burke, an army operations officer at Fort Drum, NY, said in an interview that he spent about an hour every day making PP presentations. He has spent another hour or two writing an interesting essay about PP on the Small Wars Journal website. He points out – without a single bulletpoint – that PP is not to blame: “Rather, our over-reliance on slide-view software, over-filtering of information, and over-simplification of complex ideas into small bullet points and cartoons is to blame for our communication errors. Not all presentations need be complex and filled with special effects, nor do important ideas need to be transmitted via PowerPoint.”
In other words, PowerPoint is just a tool. All depends on how we use it.
