PowerPoint Corrupts the Point Absolutely

Via Arms & Influence, a passage from that Thomas Ricks book [amazon] everyone has been reading (my copy isn’t here yet):

[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn’t get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: "It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense…In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides." That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning. "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 traditionally 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.

He reproduces one of the slides—truly a depth-defying plunge into ‘Phase IV’, i.e, reconstruction of all Iraq.

The next stage in the evolution of thought is, of course, the production of glossy brochures, selling contempt for the very notion of a working engine. Hence this William Kristol Weekly Standard piece:

It’s become clear, by contrast, that the Democratic party doesn’t really want to fight jihadism. It’s just too difficult. Last week the entire Democratic congressional leadership sent President Bush a letter on Iraq. The Democrats didn’t chastise the administration for failing to do what it takes to achieve victory there. They didn’t call for a larger military, or for more troops in Iraq, or for new tactics. Rather, they seemed to criticize the (belated) redeployment of troops "into an urban war zone in Baghdad." And they complained that "there has been virtually no diplomatic effort to resolve sectarian differences, no regional effort to establish a broader security framework, and no attempt to revive a struggling reconstruction effort" – as if these are the keys to success.

So this would be the ‘aimed pressure to not achieve end-state over time’ plan?