Afghanistan: the battle for hearts and bullet points

Winston Churchill knew where the enemy was by looking at the pieces on his "sand-table" mock-up and watching as his staff moved them around to adjust to the latest intelligence.

General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of the war in Afghanistan, has to peer at a PowerPoint slide that is so complex it makes Spaghetti Junction look like a minor road network.

The latest computer-generated presentation of the security landscape in Afghanistan, delivered in a conference room at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, was so tangled in arrows and lines that General McChrystal remarked, to guffaws from the assembled audience: "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

PowerPoint briefings are de rigueur but are also the bane of the military commander's life. When VIPS are visiting he has to sit through a presentation he has already seen half a dozen times. But this one, for sheer complexity, has become so popular it has been circulating on the internet.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid," General James Mattis, of the US Marine Corps, said at a military conference this month in North Carolina. He spoke without the Microsoft-designed computerised charts and bullet points.

PowerPoint military briefing has become such an obsession that when a US Army platoon leader in Iraq was recently asked by Company Command, a military website, how he spent most of his time, he replied: "Making PowerPoint slides."

Brigadier-General Herbert McMaster, commander of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005, told the same North Carolina conference that he had banned PowerPoint presentations when he led an operation to seize the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar.

"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," he said.

"Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."
Timesonline