For many British voters, politicians and journalists, public spending has had a bad name since the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher’s government began its long campaign to tame the supposedly bloated state. From this perspective, the public sector wastes money, commissions unnecessary or out-of-date projects and generates endless jargon and reasons for its own existence, while delivering strikingly fewer social or economic benefits.

Constant public and private lobbying for more funds from every minister, this argument continues, has helped make the job of prime minister impossible, and raised taxes and government debt to intolerable levels. Therefore the state requires a fundamental rethink – which means its sense of entitlement needs to shrink.

Yet over the past dozen years, as the call for more austerity has become the default mode of much Commons rhetoric and media commentary from rightwing ideologues to self-styled realists of the centre left, one expensive part of the public sector has been exempted. The UK’s defence budget, despite still being one of the 10 biggest in the world, is frequently said to have been “cut to the bone” and to be in urgent need of a big increase.

This argument is made not only by defence ministers, defence thinktanks, defence correspondents, defence lobbyists, trade unions with members in the industry and MPs with and without military experience, but by the head of the British armed forces, the chief of the general staff, in what has become a regular public ritual. Last month, the current incumbent, Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, told a House of Lords committee that “without changes to the settlement” – code for a spending increase – the armed forces would have to........

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