Imagine a family planning what they should get for their holidays for the next few years. Bikinis or climbing boots? Skis or malaria jabs?
What they have to do first is to decide where they want to go. Only then can they decide what they will need.
Similarly, as Richard North keeps pointing out (for instance here), you can only decide the shape of your armed forces in the light of foreign policy priorities. What have we heard about those in this debate?
Under previous governments, the defence establishment was out of control, repeatedly allowed to commission expensive programmes for bespoke weapons systems which they couldn't afford to complete - a basic failing of management control by ministers.
We lost in Southern Iraq and are now tossing lives and billions away on an unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
Cameron intones at PMQs the names of dead soldiers whose names "will never be forgotten". But of course they will be. This false sentimentality must not be carried over into defence planning.
The overstaffed top brass do not deserve well of us. Their feeble brains have cost this country billions.
Nor can we financially afford another Iraq, another Afghanistan.
So the first question must be: what are our forces for?
I see no sign of that question being asked, let alone answered.
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