Matt Bevan

It looks like a plate of spaghetti and meatballs with hundreds of lines connecting every meatball heading.

It was this incredibly complicated PowerPoint chart.

It was produced by the US military in 2010 to illustrate the difficulties they were facing during the war in Afghanistan.

When the public got a hold of it, it became a case study for how not to do PowerPoint.

This is an actual slide of the Afghanistan strategy last year and it was prepared by the staff to General Stanley McChrystal.

This is a New York Times article.

We have met the enemy and here's PowerPoint.

Even the head of US forces at the time, General Stanley McChrystal, knew immediately how bad the slide was.

When the staff brought this to McChrystal, this PowerPoint slide, he said, when we understand that slide, we will have won the war.

At the time, the US military's overuse of PowerPoint was an easy punchline for commanders when they were giving public speeches.

says in there that it is the inalienable right of every four-star army general to use PowerPoint slides when communicating.

Marine Corps General James Mattis was fond of saying, PowerPoint makes us dumb.

But there's a reason the US military kept spitting out these awful diagrams.

They were in the midst of a decades-long battle to figure out how all the different parts of the armed forces could work together more efficiently.

The interesting thing is, in the last three years or so, it appears that one company has finally figured it all out.

You might have heard of this company, Palantir.

It seems to be the evil multinational corporation du jour.

Largely secretive, Palantir specialises in the shadowy practice of data mining.

For most of its existence, Palantir flew under the radar.

It was an extremely obscure US defence contractor that few people outside the industry had ever heard of.