Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Now, gentlemen if you will just bear with me for a moment

TPM has the lowdown on how Afghanistan is going to be won for the forces of righteousness. Or maybe it's some more puzzling art?

11 comments:

mikey said...

Hee hee.

I threw this up against facebook a couple hours ago.

It's like they're TRYING to make it impenetrable. This is a war designed by a committee of consultants!

Substance McGravitas said...

It's really kind of beautiful.

Kinda sucks that it's about death.

mikey said...

To me, the much more interesting question is, could they have found a way to make it more, er, informational?

Or to be unfashionably blunt (spark that blunt, dood), was this actually commissioned to illuminate, or obfuscate?

Since it's DoD, we'll never actually know, so all opinions are equally valid...

J— said...

It looks like little "Provide Humanitarian Relief" will be spending a lot of time alone. I can't tell if it falls inside or outside the great orbit of "Duration of Operation."

Hamish Mack said...

That's an operational decision that will be assessed at a later date in an ongoing forward moving chronological framework

M. Bouffant said...

Appears to be an exploded diagram of a clusterfuck. Perhaps the first attempt to trace the evolution/development of such group activity.

Smut Clyde said...

This is V3 of the working draft, says the note in the corner. I would hate to see versions 1 and 2.

I can't help suspecting that the public-relations firm that flung it together are treating the whole extended-occupation deal as a joke, and had a good old laugh after their PPT presentation.

J— said...

From PA Consulting Group's "Solving strategic challenges for the US Department of Defense" page:

Developing tailored causal maps of key drivers of stability in regions and countries of interest, drawing on a library of analyses of regions across the world, we help give senior decision makers and their teams a shared ‘big picture view’ and a more structured way to assess options for intervention and understand likely full impacts of decisions over time to better achieve our goals and avoid unintended consequences.

The joke is on us, I'm afraid.

Smut Clyde said...

So basically PA Consulting are the intellectual equivalents of the Blackwater people.

Another Kiwi said...

Baffle 'em with bullshit and keep collecting the bucks.
Nice find J-

ckc (not kc) said...

...I had a ‘big picture view’ once, but then the drugs wore off.