Power Point: The Dangers of a Major Military Asset

By Jim Emerson, staff writer

 Intelligence is information. The best use of intelligence is to get that information in the hands of the war fighter quickly. If used correctly it saves lives and greatly aids our troops to defeat the enemy. Unfortunately, in today’s short attention span world, the most vital tool in the dissemination of intelligence is PowerPoint. More often than not, about time the PowerPoint presentation is prepared for daily briefings the information is too old to be useful.

 PowerPoint maybe a valuable tool but when used for routine daily briefs it is more potent than Ambien as a sleep aid. If terrorists were forced to sit through a typical staff level PowerPoint Intelligence Briefing it would be considered a war crime. It is the antithesis of thorough analysis and the careful decision making process.

  This brings us to reservist Army Col. Lawrence Sellin. The Colonel was dismissed less than 48 hours after authoring an Op Ed in UPI without permission. He complained that “For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death.” Not a wise career move but Col. Sellin understood that his  diatribe would land him in hot water.

He wasn’t the first to criticize the military’s over dependence of PowerPoint, retired Marine Col. T.X. Hammes wrote “It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.” He warned that PowerPoint is hostile to thoughtful decision making.

 If the Global War on Terrorism is lost it will because of the over dependence on thousands hours of useless PowerPoint briefs. In the Military Academies future Officers will most likely learn about these failures during a PowerPoint presentation.

 This day in history September 4,

 1959: The Labor Reform Act was passed by Congress. The legislation moved to reign in the power of the nation’s largest and most powerful unions. Well that didn’t work now did it?

 We may have either slumber or knowledge, but we may not have both.

Each of us must decide whether we want to prepare to be a slave or prepare to fight for our freedoms.

What did you do to support and defend American freedoms yesterday? What will you do today and tomorrow? 

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 To read more about this story go to these coachisright.com sources:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=upiUPI-20100823-112700-2345&show_article=1

 http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100827/tc_yblog_upshot/army-colonel-in-afghanistan-fired-for-criticizing-powerpoint

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/anti-powerpoint-rant-gets-colonel-kicked-out-of-afghanistan/

http://www.afji.com/2009/07/4061641

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