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Fired colonel calls PowerPoint a crutch

Army Reserve Col. Lawrence Sellin has no regrets about publishing a rant about the military’s overreliance on PowerPoint presentations — despite the fact it got him fired from his job at joint command headquarters in Afghanistan.

“I’m not sorry at all. I think there are a lot of people who feel this way, even on [General David] Petraeus’ own staff,” Sellin said in a telephone interview with Army Times. “There were colonels who came up to me and shook hands and said, ‘You were right.’”

Sellin, 61, who deployed previously to both Iraq and Afghanistan, lost his job with the staff supporting Petraeus, the commander of the International Security and Assistance Force, on Aug. 26, two days after his 680-word op-ed piece was published by the United Press International wire service.

In it, Sellin skewered the joint command as a bloated and bumbling bureaucracy.

“For headquarters staff, 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 wrote.

Officially, the Army said he violated rules requiring coordination with public affairs officials before making statements to the media.

“His comments do not reflect the reality of the work done every day at [International Joint Command] … his duty position and responsibilities did not offer him the situational awareness needed to validate his postings to the media,” said Col. Hans Bush, a spokesman for the joint command office in Kabul.

Sellin said his controversial article was the last of several efforts to find something meaningful to do at ISAF headquarters.

“Long before I wrote my controversial article, I wrote a private e-mail to my supervisor,” Sellin wrote in an e-mail to Army Times. “I explained that for six weeks I had added no value to the war effort. I was having difficulty justifying to myself being at ISAF Joint Command (IJC) and being away from my employer and family.”

This, Sellin said, “was a not so subtle plea for something meaningful to do.” He got no response, he says, and “followed up that e-mail by sending him a high-level description of how business management methodologies could be applied to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IJC.”

When he and the supervisor finally spoke to him about his concerns, the supervisor told Sellin that it was “clear that I was unhappy and that I should go home.”

Soon thereafter the supervisor was told of Sellin’s PowerPoint article. That, he said “sealed my fate.”

When not on active duty, Sellin lives in Finland and does defense contracting work involving C4ISR technology — command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. He has a doctoral degree in biophysics and Army branch qualifications in infantry, Special Forces and medical services.

In 2004, he was in Afghanistan helping to train the Afghan Army, and he served in Iraq in 2008 and 2009. He arrived in Afghanistan for a second tour in June. He said he was never given any “clear duties” on this recent deployment.

Sellin’s screed highlights a long-simmering controversy inside the military bureaucracy.

Marine Gen. James Mattis, currently chief of U.S. Central Command, told a military conference earlier this year that “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”

And Army Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned PowerPoint presentations as a brigade commander during his successful efforts to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005.

Sellin said his complaint is not solely about PowerPoint, the presentation software created in 1987.

“I don’t hate PowerPoint. It’s a useful tool,” he said. “But it can be a crutch as a substitute for thinking. It’s too easy to produce a lot of slides and create volume, not quality. You really think that with a lot of detailed slides that you’re making progress, when you are actually not.”

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