Barbie had a plan; DoD has dashboards
Defund the Dashboard Industrial Complex (DICs)
GUERRILLA MEMO// FOR OFFICIAL MOCKERY ONLY (FOMO) //
SUBJECT// 10,000 SLACKS WHEN ALL I NEED IS C2 //
NARRATIVE/
You ever try to pour a gallon of war into a teacup of tools?
Welcome to the U.S. Department of Defense, where every strategic fire is met with a tactical squirt gun and a LinkedIn post congratulating ourselves for aiming in the general direction of innovation.
For three decades, we’ve marinated in a USCENTCOM-flavored broth. Slow-cooked in FOBs, force protection slides, and kinetic “kill the problem” doctrine. Our taste buds are calibrated for IEDs and insurgents, not information ecosystems and inter-theater C2. And guess what? Now that the world’s moved on to real-deal state-on-state threats, our reflex is still to treat every strategic crisis like it's Fallujah, circa 2004.
Because if there’s one thing the military loves more than acronyms and PowerPoint, it’s solving today’s problems with yesterday’s tactics.
Strategy problem? Here’s a tactical app from 2017.
Operational chaos? Try this low-code tool someone “demo’d at SXSW.”
Coalition C2 collapsing under pressure? Have you heard of Slack?
GITHUB WON’T STOP THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE
Let me take you back to early 2022.
Russia had just decided to go masquerading as the Red Army and crash a sovereign neighbor’s borders. I was knee-deep trying to help the Ukrainian MOD stand up a real strategic information backbone. Something that could feed maneuver decisions, fuse ISR, and help push timely battle damage assessment to a dispersed, resilient force.
So naturally, Defense Digital Services and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) showed up like IT interns at a firefight:
“Hey bro, want some GitHub?”
“We got Slack channels, that’s basically C2, right?”
“Let’s set up a task tracker so you can label your chaos ‘High Priority.’”
I asked for a system to synchronize operations across forces. They gave me a workspace with three emojis, a virtual sticky note wall, and a $12M contract.
This isn’t support. This is a group chat in camo pants. This is not irony in the classical Greek tragedy sense.
This is Alanis-level irony:
It’s 10,000 Slacks when all I need is C2.
It’s Canva dashboards while the missiles fly through.
It’s AI with swagger but no follow-through.
And isn’t it ironic? Don’t ya think?
- Sgt. Jax Unplugged
STRATEGY, SHRUNK IN THE DRYER
A recent piece from the Army War College nailed it: We’ve confused strategy with problem-solving. But not in the "solve root cause" kind of way. No, we’re stuck in tactical whack-a-mole. Why? Because we trained three generations of warfighters to think that success looks like a well-synchronized strike package, not a coherent long-game.
The DoD mindset?
“If it didn’t explode, it probably wasn’t a solution.”
Our institutions are dripping in tactical instincts. We recruit it. We promote it. We reward it. You want to write a strategic plan? Better make sure there's a kinetic effect somewhere in there or your Colonel will call it "fluffy."
USCENTCOM taught us this. We’ve been conditioned to believe that war is a series of problems to be neutralized with quick, kinetic, tech-enabled actions. So, we built the tools and culture to support that.
We built a religion around the tactical raid.
We forgot to write the Book of Strategy.
J6? Tactical.
J2? Tactical.
ISR? Oh buddy, we’ll tactically full-motion-video the hell out of that compound.
But strategy? Real strategy, the kind that ties ends, ways, and means into a theater-dominating whole-of-government flex?
That’s for think tanks and laminated posters.
THE BARBIE DOCTRINE
A brilliant satire from Angry Staff Officer recently highlighted that even Barbie (2023 film) understands the difference between tactics and strategy. Barbie had a vision: change Barbie Land. That was strategy. The tactics? A whole montage of doll-driven kinetic action with choreographed outfits.
We in the DoD are Ken, wandering around with a plastic horse and a single mission: "DO TACTIC." The problem is, we treat every Barbie Land like it’s a kinetic sandbox and expect strategic effects from meme-ready mission statements.
Meanwhile, our peer adversaries are playing 5D chess with integrated national power, cyber-espionage, and trade routes while we’re over here designing another prototype GUI interface to slap over a data lake we haven’t mapped yet.
Barbie: Strategic transformation through cultural change.
DoD: “We uploaded a PowerPoint slide into Palantir, but had we briefed from just PowerPoint it’s called “stale” but because it’s now got a Palantir logo in the upper left corner, it’s magically “decision advantage”.
WE’RE NOT IN AFGHANISTAN ANYMORE, TOTO
Here’s the hard truth: what worked in USCENTCOM doesn't translate to USINDOPACOM, USEUCOM, or anywhere else with actual peer adversaries.
You can’t Dropbox your way to deterrence. You can’t Slack your way to command and control. And you definitely can’t GitHub your way to strategic overmatch.
We need fused, resilient, enterprise-grade C2 architectures. We need decision advantage that isn’t a glorified whiteboard in a bunker. We need tools that enable theater-scale synchronization, not another god-forsaken dashboard pretending to be a JADC2 silver bullet.
We keep claiming we're fighting in "contested, degraded, operationally limited" environments. So why do our default solutions require uninterrupted 5G Wi-Fi, 6 plug-ins, and a UI optimized for Silicon Valley interns?
This isn’t digital transformation.
It’s “Innovation Ken” doll in digital dress-up and just as anatomically incorrect.
HERE’S THE REAL IRONIC TWIST
We keep saying we need “whole-of-government” and “data-centric” war-fighting approaches. But every time we get a crisis?
We toss a startup at it. I’m looking at you, Anduril.😏
Or worse, we throw a proprietary legacy platform in a new GUI and pretend it’s “next-gen.” Hi Palantir! 👋
Not a strategy. Not a framework. Just a tactical tool, labeled "transformational," because it has a dashboard, a retired 2 Star V.P. on the Board, and someone at DIU thinks it's cool.
It’s like strapping a white paper to a Navy SEAL and calling it national strategy.
Tactics don’t scale. Strategy does.
Demand more than duct-taped dashboards.
We need to rewire the culture that treats every new problem as a “target package opportunity.” We need tools that can actually support campaign planning across domains and partners. And we need to stop pretending that another Slack workspace is going to fix the fact that no one knows what anyone else is doing.
So, how do we dust off 30 years of tactical warfighting solutioneering?
Blow up the mindset. (Not with JDAMs. With doctrine.)
Defund the dashboard industrial complex (DICs). We don’t need another plugin. We need a plan.
Replace tactical dopamine with strategic discipline. (X “Twitter” threads ≠ theater-level coordination.)
Because Barbie had a plan.
Ken just had a plastic horse.
Join the rebellion.
Smash the tactical ceiling.
Guerrilla Memo: Strategy, with teeth.
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