“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” General Mattis said at a military conference in North Carolina.
Read the slide above and just marvel at it. It’s one that the American military leadership presented back in 2010 on the Afghanistan situation. Remember, PowerPoint exists to make understanding of something simple, and this slide was as close as the Pentagon could come to making Afghanistan look “simple.”
Now the reality is that it is more than just a PowerPoint slide, it’s something called a Causal Loop Diagram created from a Systems Dynamic model used by a consulting group called The PA Consulting Group. This diagram required a 31-page explanation you can read here if you really want to try and make sense of this thing.
PA Consulting is based in the United Kingdom. So, the best and brightest minds influencing our decision-making about Afghanistan were civilian employees of a British consulting group and not our own people at the Pentagon or even our own consulting groups like the Rand Corp. And what about the National War College, or the Army War College? Or the academics of the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy?
Don’t we have anyone who understands Afghanistan and counter-insurgency warfare in this country anymore?
The U.K. is certainly our ally but do they have a military with the kind of punching weight for their consultants to be the go-to-guys for how to fight a counter-insurgency campaign? Right now among the military forces of the world, the U.K. ranks 31st, below countries like Bangladesh, Columbia, and Sri Lanka. Would we go to any of them for advice?
You can Watch the Milley Hearing Below
The bottom line to a reasoning person would be to look at a Causal Loop diagram, like the above, and think, “This is a very bad idea, get us out of it.”
But this is America and our “never say die” and “can do” attitude sometimes blinds us to the reality of things.
This can be bad when we overestimate our actual ability to get something done. That diagram above should have made us reconsider whether we could succeed in Afghanistan in the long run and point out the very clear fact that nobody really understood what the Hell we were doing there 10 years ago.
On the SEAL teams, you learn very quickly that failure is the greatest teacher if you can recognize it when it happens. If you can’t learn anything you will fail over and over again in the same way.
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