Excellent article - thank you for sharing your views. I agree with pretty much everything you've written and having been both a general in the Army and a senior civil servant, I think the Solarium idea has real attraction. I think it's helpful for the UK to have a national or grand strategy that sets out its (realistic) level of ambition (globally and nationally) as this provides the context for defence and other departments. As you suggest, the trouble is that governments nearly always develop strategies that have visions or desired endstates that are just not achievable with the resources they have available, which is one of the reasons that so many of them fail. But a great article which I enjoyed.
Excellent article - thank you for sharing your views. I agree with pretty much everything you've written and having been both a general in the Army and a senior civil servant, I think the Solarium idea has real attraction. I think it's helpful for the UK to have a national or grand strategy that sets out its (realistic) level of ambition (globally and nationally) as this provides the context for defence and other departments. As you suggest, the trouble is that governments nearly always develop strategies that have visions or desired endstates that are just not achievable with the resources they have available, which is one of the reasons that so many of them fail. But a great article which I enjoyed.