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Commentators discuss the national security strategy released yesterday and the strategic defence and security review due to be announced later today.

that the defence cuts seem to be at odds with defence strategy:

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"Reading the national security strategy yesterday, I was quite surprised how often this idea of power projection was reinforced throughout the strategy. International military crisis was one of the top tier of challenges; threats to overseas territories came in the second and third tier.
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"To wake up to hear we are going to lose our current aircraft carrier and delay or reconfigure the second one is very mysterious."

The a contradiction between the vision and the practicalities of defence planning:

"The Prime Minister defined our national interest in the 21st Century as requiring 'full and active engagement in world affairs, promoting our security, our prosperity and our values'. In other words, this country - still the world's third-biggest defence spender - must continue to punch above its weight. That is the right approach. Whether this can be achieved will become clearer today when Mr Cameron sets out the future size and configuration of our Armed Forces. We now have some idea of the ends - but will we have the means?"

The the security strategy for lacking long-term "grand strategy":

"Both the last Labour government and the coalition have fallen prey to short-termism in military planning and neither has served the interests of the military or the nation well. One committed itself unthinkingly to war in a surge of political testosterone and delayed a proper defence review. The other is guided by even more short-term aims, unleashing an inter-service rivalry and a storm of special pleading. It is the worst possible atmosphere in which to calmly assess the threats of the future. But even so, there are questions which this review should have asked but did not: will it always be the case that Britain's chief defence partner should be the US and not, say, France or Europe? Should we try to be a player in all theatres of war? Is this flexibility or just hubris?"

The [subscription required] the scaling back of two aircraft carriers to cut costs a "humiliating reflection of failures of financial control and military planning":

"Military planning has always been a balance of competing interests in order to yield the most effective force posture. Yet the SDSR has clearly become a three-way arm wrestle among the Services for government resources. And this proposal demonstrates that the process lacks economic sense as well as military logic...
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"But the military role cannot be performed when there are chaotic flaws in planning and procurement. The compromise announced in the SDSR shows that the previous Government and the Ministry of Defence signed contracts for the new aircraft carriers without properly considering the costs, the economies of scale and the opportunity costs of buying the equipment and the aircraft to sustain them."

In the [registration required] the question of what to do with the aircraft carriers has distracted the whole defence review:

"The thread that links the myriad threats is interdependence. Few of them - think of terrorism, proliferation, or cyberattacks - can be countered without the close assistance of friends and allies.
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"The misnamed strategic defence review might have been a moment to set out Britain's contribution to this collective effort, as well as to modernise the defences of the homeland. Instead, it has bequeathed the nation two expensive aircraft carriers without jets to fly from them."

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