Commentary: we will have to rely on our allies

The review and policy looked like a recipe for a train crash from the start.

The main problem is the obsession with numbers - one shared between the suits and the military uniforms in Whitehall.

They're obsessed with the numbers of military and civil personnel, the numbers in equipment budgets, and the number of years we can hang on with little better than Dad's Army resources in many departments, hoping that that nothing serious affecting the nation's security, let alone World War Three, is going to break out in the mean time.

The report says that by 2015, the end of the current cuts cycle, will 'lack the capacity' to do many of the military jobs it does now and may well need to do again.

Instead, according to the government, we'll have to rely on allies. Rightly, the alarms the Committee - because all the allies , the US included are cutting back as sharply as the UK.

Areas of the world, once regarded vital to the interests and security of the UK, will become even more ungoverned, wild, and sources of disruption to our own lands, through terrorism, narco terrorism and a host of other evils.

The strange thing is that old the maxim of 'be ready for the unexpected' is no longer the point. A lot of the threats and risks can and are being identified.

The key to the numbers game is how to regenerate capacity, whether in personnel, equipment, or geo-political and strategic thinking - where common sense seems too easily have yielded to self-serving pseudo academic mumbo jumbo.

Run down the numbers of serving men and women by all means, provided you can recruit and regenerate when the new threats and needs arise in the decade to come.

Any of the big equipment programmes, whose real cost wasn't known or deliberately concealed at the outset, like aircraft carriers, Typhoon fighters, and Nimrod MRA4 survey planes, should wherever possible be put on death row.

Is anyone out there Whitehall or No 10 listening? I doubt it, as they've all become their own pseudo academic military defence experts.