Tactical Jenga vs. The Strategic Stopwatch

[William F. Owen]

What he's doing is attempting to show how outside considerations can interact with the realities of what's happening in the theater. The spikes show areas where local considerations might bump up against the external timeline and create domestic issues (like "is the surge working") and thus spark in-theater damage control (or adjustments to the external timeline).
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So there's a tension between what the policy makes/politicians want, and the reality of progress on the ground? Ya Allah! Hold the Front Page!

...and the Jenga thing? The more you interact with it, the more likely it is to fall over? Stopwatch, unstoppable and predictable?

Maybe I've had too much coffee!

[Ron Humphrey]

So there's a tension between what the policy makes/politicians want, and the reality of progress on the ground? Ya Allah! Hold the Front Page!

...and the Jenga thing? The more you interact with it, the more likely it is to fall over? Stopwatch, unstoppable and predictable?

Maybe I've had too much coffee!

Battlefield Geometry, due to the overall constrictions placed on operations by external requirement it is necessary to move pieces. The important questions are the ones only the operational commanders can try to answer because if any movement starts to bring the house down they would be the first to see it and possibly be able to move something else instead.

Also consider that in Jenga your not the only player moving pieces, so do all other players and thus one must watch closely to be able to see what else is being moved and where current fault lines may lay.

Stopwatch makes sense to me because those on the outside have pressures of their own which give them quite a bit less flexibility in adjusting fires quickly and thus the constant need to stay tracking at a certain pace.

[Randy Brown]

I really want to like (and borrow) this graphic, but the application of Jenga as an analogy ultimately ... falls apart for me.

Others here have rather cleverly noted how the game involves multiple actors, looking for fault lines, etc. Still, for me, evoking the game works cross-purposes with the intended message behind the slide.

Assuming that the Jenga tower represents stability/order/a working government, consider: The way in which one wins a game of Jenga is to be the last person to make a move, immediately proceeding the point at which someone else makes the whole thing tumble to the ground.

Not to put too coarse a point on it, but you could also say that the objective is to make the destruction of the structure look like someone else's fault.

I hope to come up with a constructive suggestion of a more constructive analogy, preferably in the form of a game or activity. In the meantime, anyone else have any suggestions? Or interpretations?

[Randy Brown]

Yes, my reptilian English-major brain is in overdrive on this topic, but even if Jenga represents "troop levels," rather than "host-nation effectiveness" (my original assumption), the whole tipping tower image still makes me queasy. I get visions of troop-carrying helicopters lifting off of Jenga-block rooftops ...