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Power Point Army
- Col P K Mallick
No bastard ever won a war by making slides for his country, He won it
by making the other poor dumb bastard make slides for his country.
Gen George S Patton, Jr (If he were around today)
We were in the middle of a desert as part of Umpire and Control Organisation. A Strike
Corps was being exercised. I was trying to contact 2IC of a RAPID Signal Regiment
who is a wizard in communication and computers and who happened to write the
software for Rural Automatic Exchange for C-DAC before joining Army. When unable to
contact him as he was always busy with briefings I went down to the Div HQ to meet the
officer. I still could not meet him as he was busy sprucing up GOC’s briefing slides.
Communications could wait.
During OP-PARAKRAM as part of a holding formation I heard some briefing and orders
in real life scenario and not Exercises. Brigade Commander was using Power Point
(PPT) slides in hundreds with all the gizmos. One wondered what happened to good old
personal touch, contact and direct communication to the subordinate commanders.
As Col GS (Sys) of a Command HQ I was once asked by a very senior officer to
organize training cadre for staff officers of the HQ to make good PPT slides as ours
were dull and boring where even our subordinate formations’ slides were impressive
complete with lot of colour and animations.
Over the years Power Point slides have completely taken over the briefing in Army.
More emphasis is being given to total number of slides, quality of animation, colour of
the highlights and backgrounds, format of the bullets, fonts, graphics, animation, GIF
and JPEG photos and what have you. Earlier slides in transparencies used to be made
by “eye en tee” or survey people in HQs. Now officers make slides putting the famous
