The U.S. military finds bullets a very useful means of sending a message.

We’re not talking field ops, but the type of bullets that riddle projection screens and communiqués.

The little buggers are awfully useful for highlighting and summarizing. Problem is, they can also greatly oversimplify messy, complex situations beset by interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. Like combat conditions, bureaucratic tangles, or the average American workplace.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” says Iraqi commander Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster in The New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

That doesn’t quiet the staccato bursts of pseudo info, of course.  In fact, a whole cadre of officers spend so much time making presentations they are nicknamed PowerPoint Rangers. You can’t blame policy-makers and strategists for trying to bring sanity, hierarchy, and order to a messy world.

But, according to the Times, commanders say that the slides don’t impart as much useful information as a five-page paper and generally lack polished, analytic, persuasive prose – and, worse, can stifle discussion, critical thinking, and thoughtful decision-making. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” sums up Marine Gen. James N. Mattis.

And such stupidity can be costly. According to the book “Fiasco” Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, wouldn’t issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted. Instead, he just passed on to Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led 2003 Iraq invasion, a series of vague slides that he had already shown to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Still, it’s not going anywhere. It’s too imbedded in the culture. Gen. David Petraeus, who today oversees the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and says some PowerPoint briefings are “just agony,” uses the program himself because he appreciates its ability to display of maps and statistical trends.

Communication tools can facilitate communication, not substitute for it. Overcomplexify or oversimplify — there are perils everywhere. If you try to visually capture the complicated interrelationships and levels in a messy situation, you get a perplexing mishmash (as I noted in an earlier post). Or you could simplify and risk eliminating the nuance that’s necessary for true understanding and wise decision making. You’re stuck between Iraq and a hard place.