During the last Tory government I was invited by a defence minister, it doesn’t matter which one, all goofs, to speak in his office about their then strategy and defence review, it doesn’t matter which one, all crap. I was flattered though. I brought along a copy of Imperial Military Geography, I think 1935 edition, my point being that you must decide the war for which you are preparing and then take stock of your resources and that is exactly what the people who won WW2 did. I said that you must not assume that some other power was going to deliver capability you needed but did not possess organically. That included assumptions about the USA and other powers. A nation state like Britain had to start from an honest calculation of its resources and capabilities relative to its interests and capabilities. As of 2026 this seems pretty obvious. At the time, the minister’s political advisor sat at his shoulder rolling his eyes at practically everything I said like I was an escapee from a lunatic asylum. The minister, a political man, shook my hand warmly and I’ve never spoken to a minister again. The moral of the story is not that the minister and his advisor was stupid. They were blind, but it’s a kind of blindness that afflicts smart people who are too smart by half so that they never question their assumptions because they’re too convinced of what they think they know.