Now, in case you don't see why this is a problem, try and make sense of this (a scan of one of the slides in question.) Now, if you were a military commander, what would you think your objective was supposed to be?
There's a reason that the military typically uses clear, dry language to give written orders. Apparently, this was dropped sometime during the Revolution in Military Affairs. From Thomas Ricks' Fiasco:
"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology—above all information technology—has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionall governing the preparation and conduct of war," commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. "To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness." It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer's glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.The Revolution in Military Affairs needs its 18 Brumaire, and quick.
Just to be clear, this isn't just Rumsfeld's fault. Once again, Ricks' book makes it clear that the military high command (most especially Tommy Franks) is deeply responsible for this disaster.
The US Army may need to be entirely rebuilt after Iraq, like it was after Vietnam.
1 comment:
Okay, seeing that slide I know who's running the Pentagon -- it's one of my old bosses.
This "communications expert" was convinced it was possible, indeed preferable, to cram a thousand words worth of detailed analysis into one confusing, um, diagram, so long as it looked dramatic and pretty and had lots of colours.
(We spent a lot of time hassling over the proper shades of green and ochre, and had, I believe, six or seven different ways of punctuating bullet points, each with an elaborate justification in case the client noticed.)
I see now that this person was a nascent neo-con, in the sense that they understood reality through only one framework and tried to fit everything into it. We (the minions) had to do a lot of chopping and filling to make the facts fit the plan, believe me.
Thanks for the deja vu, I think.
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