{"id":188585,"date":"2010-08-29T18:13:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-29T23:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/29\/a-true-american-hero\/"},"modified":"2010-08-29T18:13:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-29T23:13:00","slug":"a-true-american-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/29\/a-true-american-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"A True American Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Colonel Lawrence Sellin, US Army Reserve, who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/dangerroom\/2010\/08\/u-s-officer-in-afghanistan-mows-down-powerpoint-rangers\/\">published a blistering critique of the &#8220;PowerPoint Ranger&#8221; culture within the military in Afghanistan<\/a>, and was then <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/dangerroom\/2010\/08\/anti-powerpoint-rant-gets-colonel-kicked-out-of-afghanistan\/\">promptly fired and kicked out of Afghanistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This is not surprising.  When one publishes an OP\/Ed which contains gems such as this:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>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. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general&#8217;s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system&#8217;s blue screen of death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It ain&#8217;t good for career prospects.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the phrase, &#8220;Cognitively Challenged Generals,&#8221; used in a publicly published opinion piece, is pretty much a letter of resignation for any member of the military.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it mirrors my experience with FCS, were the generals seemed tremendously concerned about the consistency of colors between variants of the manned ground vehicle in the presentations.<\/p>\n<p>If I were SedDef, I would be tempted to place an immediate and absolute ban on the software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colonel Lawrence Sellin, US Army Reserve, who published a blistering critique of the &#8220;PowerPoint Ranger&#8221; culture within the military in Afghanistan, and was then promptly fired and kicked out of Afghanistan. This is not surprising. When one publishes an OP\/Ed which contains gems such as this: For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1060,1169,1006,989,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer","category-heroism","category-military","category-software","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}