PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy 233
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."
NASA / Ed Tufte reference (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not bullet-izable (Score:5, Interesting)
... 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.
That's not a weakness of powerpoint, it's a weakness of the presenter.
I've given powerpoint presentations, but they were just the front end of a much deeper paper.
The way I learned to use powerpoint was that it should provide enough information for people to know whether or not they want to read your full paper.
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.
Holy. Farking. Shit.
I imagine this is what the presentation looked like:
Looks familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I agree. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:I know that slide... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No, don't do that, because each line in and of itself is simplified, and doesn't tell you anything you shouldn't have already known if you weren't being overly simplistic yourself. As you say, it's obvious. So what's the point of looking at the obvious and simplistic as represented in such a tangled mess?
Look at the slide as a whole. What's the message? "The situation in Afghanistan is a network of interrelated feedback loops vastly too complicated to be conveyed in a single slide". That's the only real information this slide conveys.
I could actually see this slide being highly useful if displayed to the right people. People who are involved in policy but have too simple an idea of the war. "Oh good, I'm going to have the war explained in a powerpoint slide," they say, thinking of typical PP presentations they've seen. The bam, up pops that tangled mess. "Whoa, this is way more complicated than I thought!" And there you go. Message imparted.
Re:Knowledge Limited (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one to realize that the 'Spaghetti slide' is supposed to be unintelligible? The presentation in question was about how complex a modern, asymmetrical war can be. Each bubble is a single aspect, and each edge is a relationship between two aspects. It's meant to show the overwhelming complexity of the war in Afghanistan, and it does a damn good job of doing that.
Re:It's not powerpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worse than that. Putting together a powerpoint can give you the illusion that you've summarized and presented some issue clearly, when in fact, there is no content.
At work, we hired a contractor to do some initial investigation into a scientific problem for us. After spending some time gathering data, they gave us a summary powerpoint as the final report. We pushed back hard, saying instead that we wanted a written summary.
When it came back, the results had changed. By forcing them to actually put the summary of the data in writing, they were forced to spend longer thinking about the data, and through that analysis, they came up with a more accurate answer.
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with information packed slides is that the audience is momentarily given lots of information but having too little time to parse it won't recall it later.
Actually, most presentators use that as a FEATURE: The non-understanding of the basic facts caused by intentional information overload guarantees, that there are no valid refutations in the discussions phase, which makes for an easy pitch (of mostly bad ideas).
Re:PowerPoint makes us stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience is mostly company level / lower enlisted stuff, especially the "death by powerpoint" training slides.
TRADOC (training and doctrine command) consistently assumes that people have no interest in learning how things work and tries to break everything into endless lists of steps.
For example, in Airborne school, they explained preparing to land like so:
If you are moving forward, pull the rear set of risers to your chest. If you are moving to the left, pull the right set of risers to your chest. If you are moving to the right, pull the left set of risers to your chest. If you are moving backwards, pull the front set of risers to your chest.
What's going on is you pull the risers in the direction you want to go, and your goal is to slow down so you don't get dragged all over the DZ, but they won't simply *say* that even when it's far, far simpler.
Everything is itemized as task, conditions, standards. Everything is a list of steps to memorize, even if there are ten lists with just one thing different between the lists. (If you're curious what they look like, google Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks.)
There are, in fairness, a large number of very well written field manuals. However, most of my experience with training has been from these damned lists of tasks or, worst of all, powerpoint slides generated from lists of tasks; field manuals seem to be something you read on your own time.
What's happened, I think, is that TRADOC is a huge bureaucracy, and they are more concerned with getting everything into a standard format than with the material being useful. They just can't figure out how to produce a large body of coherent thought, and have fallen back on endless checklists and outlines.