Powerpoint Rangers: The Aesthetics and Historical Significance of Military Storyboards

One-slide PowerPoint presentations called “storyboards” were a dominant medium for planning and documenting military operations and significant events during America’s 21^st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prepared at every level of command by all services, military storyboards combined new graphic-design and digital-media technologies to coordinate, narrate, and construct understanding of commander intentions and subordinate unit achievement. Ephemeral in immediate impact, designed primarily for internal military use, and now buried behind security protocols restricting easy access, storyboards’ importance has not been noted and assessed by the non-military public, communication scholars, and historians. This presentation proposes that storyboards constitute an important primary-source resource for students of America’s Post-9/11 wars as they constitute a near-“real-time” record of the wars’ execution constructed by the participants themselves. The presentation will suggest strategies for understanding the aesthetic and communicative rhetoric of storyboards and situate their use in the context of military decision-making and record-keeping processes. It will also suggest possibilities for accessing military storyboard archives and leveraging them for historical research and appraisal.