The Admirals' letter to The Times on November 10 provoked an unprecedented retort from the five Chiefs two days later, telling everyone to shut up and get with the programme. Who ordered whom to write such an ill-judged rebuke will eventually become public. These things always do. But its effect was to force the current Chiefs, and especially General Sir David Richards, the new CDS, to drink a poisoned brew that they did not mix, handed to them in the Stirrup cup. 

And it compromised the Chiefs' authority in an unprecedented and vulnerable manner. It set them up to be rebuffed the same day in the Lords' debate. 

In his equally notorious leaked letter to the Prime Minister last September, Fox (correctly again) wrote: "This process is looking less and less defensible as a proper strategic review and more like a super CSR (Comprehensive Spending Review)...We do not have a narrative that we can communicate clearly." Unless it is understood why the SDSR was not and could not be any such thing, but only a cuts exercise, and why the NSS is such a lamentable piece of work, we shall be at risk of repetition of these errors. Nor has SDSR succeeded as a cuts exercise, even as it has amputated limbs of British military capability. The SDSR plan is still unfunded to the tune of more than £1 billion a year, in the view of informed commentators on the economics of defence procurement.

Shortly before the NSS and SDSR were published, the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) published its first Inquiry of the new parliamentary term. It chose to examine the most pertinent question possible: "Who ‘does' national security?" The committee's astonishing finding was that nowadays no one "does" strategic analysis. What matters most for SDSR is that it found the strategic assessment methodology employed to be unsafe. 

This is the country that was once peerless in showing the world how to assess its strategic interests. That skill was displayed in Viscount Castlereagh's celebrated State Paper of May 5, 1820, which surveyed the world after Napoleon's defeat with an acuity which ensured that its guidance served us well for decades. It can be studied in A. J. Balfour's innovative 1903 Committee of Imperial Defence, which undertook to "survey as a whole the strategical needs [of the Empire], to deal with the complicated questions which are all essential elements in that general problem and to revise from time to time their previous decisions, so that the Cabinet shall always be informed." It accomplished by intellectual force what the flaccid National Security Secretariat prose, listlessly extrapolating, fails to do today. 

The National Security Strategy, the basis of the SDSR, employs the "ends/ways/means" formula, common in military campaign planning. State the end; define the way; prescribe the means. But the NSS cannot credibly state our ends. Its statement is bland to the point of meaninglessness. Then Paras 3.6-3.10 and Annex A of the NSS explain the National Security Risk Assessment (NSRA) methodology. It was adapted from a methodology used for civil emergencies-discrete, so-called "tame" problems, that may be complex but which are amenable to containment and solution. It also shows a diagram which we are told does not correlate wolf currently thought to be near/nearer/nearest the sledge with priority and with money, but which in practice does just that. The choice of template and the discussion of method demonstrate no awareness, such as we find in (for example) the Australian government's published thinking, of the central challenge for modern strategic analysis. This is to have both the eyes and the mind open to spot and correctly identify what Donald Rumsfeld called "unknown unknowns". Perversely, the SDSR claims greater certainty than it is prudent to do because its analysts' eyes and minds are closed to the unexpected. It deals in "known unknowns". Citing past surprises — the Falklands, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait — Lord Inge warned: "We have not been good about predicting the future, so we have to have that range of capabilities."