There's something brilliant about this slide from General Petraeus' presentation. We all know that straight-line extrapolations from past trends aren't a good way to reason. But it's a bit fishy when your future projection follows a completely different trend from the past. Of course, how much we appropriate is under our control, so we can just do this if we like. But I'm not sure what it's supposed to show.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/04/projections/44273/
