Reason no. 278 to hate powerpoint

The National Security Archive, an "independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University" that spends its time filing as many FOIA requests as possible with various national security agencies, has posted a series of Powerpoint slides that are apparently from an August 2002 briefing on preinvasion planning for the war in Iraq. In hindsight, they make for pretty grim reading. For example, a slide listing "Key Planning Assumptions" includes the following:

• Opposition groups will work with us
• Co-opted Iraqi units will occupy garrisons and not fight either US forces or other Iraqi units
• DoS [Department of State] will promote creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government -- prior to D-day
• Iraqi regime has WMD capability

An interesting sidelight for those of us who will never plan a war is the commentary on the Archive's website from two military officers concerning the role of Powerpoint in war planning. The officers were highly critical of the move from traditional briefing methods to Powerpoint:

Lt. Gen. McKiernan later told Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks (Fiasco,
p. 75):

"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 set of PowerPoint slides... [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides."

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich told Ricks (Fiasco, pp. 75-76) that PowerPoint war planning was the ultimate insult:

"Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's [Office of Secretary of Defense] 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. To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness."

There's a neat shortcut around the morass of political finger-pointing that looms ahead of us for at least the next two years- blame Microsoft.