"...You know what I think of these commanders? I'll tell you what I think.They can't take a piss without a Power Point presentation."

Yowza!

Welcome to The March of the Porcelain Soldiers , quite a piece of blowback written by Col. David Hackworth for GQ, but pulled because of 9-11. After seeing what he calls "poor performance" of conventional troops on the ground in Afghanistan, he posted this at his site. If you don't know him by name, go to his site for the picture, and everything else--you've seen him on the tube. The snappy Powerpoint quote isn't Hackworth's, it's from a Drill Sergeant, one of many he interviewed on a visit to Fort Snoopy. Yeah, Fort Snoopy. It's actually Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the largest Basic Combat Training command for garden-variety boy and girl grunts. But the way he puts it, there's not too much grunting going on any more unless you count co-ed, ahem, anatomy drill.

But the part that really snared me was his spittle over "today's values based Army." It turns out Powerpoint and buzzword performance prattle wears camo, too. He hears a square-jaw Ranger Batallion Commander use the word "nurture" and about has an embolism. Too funny. I've always thought "Army of One" went against any tenet of unit cohesion I ever understood: break em down individually, build em up together. Essentially antithetical, self-centered, Brand Me crapola, rife for misinterpretation--especially considering the creative produced for it. Sure, you could try to say, "No, No. It means a Big One, Like E Pluribus Unum: Out of many one." But I've never heard anyone really give that a game go. It still sounds like maybe the Army of Unum brochures aren't back from the printers yet.