Britain will this year spend more than £50billion on its military, making us the sixth-largest defence spender on the planet and the biggest in Europe.
It’s still not enough in these increasingly dangerous times, with wars, hostile dictatorships and security threats on all fronts. But there is now a welcome consensus on the mainstream Right and Left that we need to spend more.
Yet even those most enthusiastic about bigger defence budgets are troubled by a nagging question: where do the billions we currently spend actually go?
On the face of it we don’t seem to be getting (as the Americans would put it) much of a bang for our buck.