The corrupting influences of PowerPoint are back in the news with a New York Times article on military backlash against the ubiquitous presentation software.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid," Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, head of the Joint Forces Command, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina, the article states.

The article relates a number of PowerPoint anecdotes, including one about the slide to the left (click to view full-size image), to which Army Lt Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the head of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, reportedly said, "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."

Disdain for the presentation software, while always pervasive, has recently become more prominent. A 2009 commentary in the Armed Forces Journal fulminates that "PowerPoint is not a neutral tool--it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making." A blog post in the Small Wars Journal recounts the story in which then-Central Command chief, Army Gen. Tommy Franks started the invasion of Iraq with a PowerPoint slide, "instead of explicit, written orders."

Actually, the PowerPoint backlash has been more or less continuous for a decade now. In 2000, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Hugh Shelton ordered military presenters to spend less energy making elaborate slides.

A mid-decade Air Force satirical PowerPoint presentation poked fun at presenters' tendency to elide over tough challenges through colorful graphics, by proposing  the use of dolphins as a directed energy weapons platform.

For more:
- read the NYT article
- read the Armed Forces Journal essay, "Dumb-dumb bullets; As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool"
- go to the Small Wars Journal blog post on PowerPoint
- see the PowerPoint presentation on Directed Energy Sea Mammals (.pdf)
- see another satire, the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation