[Infowarrior] - 1/2: Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant

[Richard Forno]

Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant

	• By Spencer Ackerman  
	• August 27, 2010  | 
	• 8:58 am  | 
	• Categories: Info War

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/anti-powerpoint-rant-gets-colonel-kicked-out-of-afghanistan/

Consider it a new version of death by PowerPoint. The NATO command in Afghanistan has fired a staff officer who publicly criticized its interminable briefings, its over-reliance on Microsoft’s slide-show program, and what he considered its crushing bureaucracy.

Army Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack Thursday from his job as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Kabul. The hammer fell barely 48 hours after United Press International ran a passionate op-ed he wrote to lament that “little of substance is really done here.” He tells Danger Room, “I feel quite rather alone here at the moment.”

The colonel’s rant called into question whether ISAF’s revamped command structure, charged with coordinating the day-by-day war effort, was much more than a briefing factory. Or, as Sellin put it, “endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information.”

According to Sellin, when his commanding general (whom he doesn’t want to name) saw that Sellin described IJC as a blinkered bureaucracy, he informed the colonel that it was time to pack his things. “He was very polite and shook my hand and wished me luck,” Sellin says.

A spokesman for the command cited the specific regulation that sealed Sellin’s fate:  NATO Directive (95-1); failure to clear “written or oral presentations to the media” through a designated public-affairs officer. “His comments do not reflect the reality of the work done every day at IJC,”  says its director of public affairs, Colonel Hans Bush. “His insights are his own, however, his duty position and responsibilities did not offer him the situational awareness needed to validate his postings to the media.”


Effectively, that means enlisted men and officers are freer to speak their minds in front of embedded reporters than they are while serving on headquarters staff. Additionally troops are basically free to provide their opinions on a blog — as long as it doesn’t violate operational security, and as long as they don’t claim to be speaking for the Defense Department officially. Had Sellin blogged or tweeted his critique rather than published it through a wire service, maybe he’d still have his job.

Sellin says he tried to send constructive criticism up the chain before he typed out his UPI piece. He gave his superiors a briefing on “proven organizational methodologies” to streamline IJC, but it went nowhere. “It was only my rant that everyone read,” he says. “My hope is that after they stop being angry at me, maybe they will take a serious look at how they operate.” The irony? His briefing was a five-slide PowerPoint.

Apparently, not everyone at IJC was as gracious as Sellin’s boss when the op-ed began to circulate. Sellin says that a two-star general — whom he declines to name — told him “I was a coward, unpatriotic, ignorant, petty and that he had no respect for me.” Sellin gauges that lieutenant colonels and lower-ranked officers support him, as do a few colonels. “In regard to most of the other colonels,” he concedes, I have marks all over me from where they have been touching me with ten-foot poles.”

Sellin is going to head home to Finland, where he’s worked for the past several years for an information-technology company that he asks me not to name. He doesn’t wish any of his now-former colleagues in IJC any ill will. But he wonders if recently-admitted problems training the Afghan security forces — the U.S.’s ultimate ticket out of the ten-year old war — is going to yield any greater sense of urgency from IJC.

“Mine is not an indictment of people or am I questioning their intentions, just some judgments that are being made and the methods that are being used,” he says. “It can be done better. We can fulfill our national security needs and get out.”

Update: Sellin wrote a lot more for UPI than just his thoughts on PowerPoint. Check out his full archive of columns here.