In Afghanistan, loose lips sink careers, it seems: First, commanding general Stanley McChrystal got the boot for speaking too freely about his Commander in Chief. And now NATO has fired a colonel serving as a staff officer in Afghanistan for daring to criticize the most important tool we have in the fight against insurgents: PowerPoint.[more]
Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports that Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year-old Army reservist, has been dismissed from his post in headquarters with NATO's International Security Assistance Force less than 48 hours after he published an op-ed, via UPI, complaining that the "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." Sellin clearly anticipated that his tirade, which NATO says he didn't clear for publication in advance, would serve as a resignation letter. It opened with, "Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now. Consider the following therapeutic." He went on to excoriate the meaningless, self-serving, metastasizing military bureaucracy that holds sway in Afghanistan and justifies its existence via PowerPoint slide: "Little of substance is really done here, but that is a task we do well."
10 hours ago
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