PowerPoint is Dead. Long Live PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is Dead. Long Live PowerPoint. By SWJ Friend “Doctrine Man” at Tom Ricks’ Best Defense
… From crowded operations centers in combat zones far from our shores to the fluorescently-antiseptic hallways of the Pentagon, no phrase will draw a nervous sideways glance quicker than "Death by PowerPoint." Utter those words aloud in any environment and battle captains descend into laptop defilade, staff officers scatter like cockroaches in sunlight, and commanders at all levels sigh in frustration.
PowerPoint hailed the death of critical thinking. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming: the mind map from the ninth circle of hell, the military's acquisition life cyclorama, or just about any orders "briefing" which typically runs longer than the time required to produce an actual order. PowerPoint has infected our military culture like a digital zombie apocalypse, transforming our leaders into the intellectual equivalent of the living dead. We have met the enemy and he is us.
In Richard Russell's Best Defense post, he rightly identifies a problem rooted in Professional Military Education (PME) and advocates a ban on PowerPoint as a necessary first step in military educational reform. But PowerPoint isn't the problem, it's just a symptom of a deeper problem years in the making. PowerPoint is merely a tool; it's the tool behind the tool with whom we should concern ourselves…
