With the imminent publication of the new government's first Strategic Defence Review this article throws out a challenge. Can we make the first cheap British Army division of the modern period? Can we afford not to?

The 'world-beating' delusion

Britain has a 'world-beating' epidemic. It would be funny if we were not paying such a high cost for this delusion. Who started it may be debated. That it has become an empty boast is indisputable. The graph below shows the frequency of use of the phrase in Parliament. It has only got worse.

How is Britain world-beating? Our social statistics certainly attract attention:

40% of adults pay no income tax, because their annual income does not exceed the £12,570 personal allowance threshold;

One third of 35-45 year olds in England now rents (it was one in ten at the beginning of the century), and four in every ten of the private renters is receiving housing benefit (or they would be on the street);

By the time Universal Credit is fully rolled out, one in four working age households will be receiving it;

Almost one fifth of Britain's school children, apparently, have special educational needs;

At the other end of the scale, Britain's graduates now collectively owe around £240 billion in student loans;

Over one million16-24 years olds are neither in education, employment nor training (the NEETs), the main reason cited is 'mental health', remedied by a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) (over 3.3 million Britons in England and Wales were claiming a PIP last year).

And so we could go on.

How the British Army is 'world-beating' also raises questions. Marlborough's Grand Alliance army at the beginning of the 18th century was bigger. Cromwell had more cavalry regiments. The country that invented the tank can today deploy and sustain one tank regiment (plainly, there must be a reserve or you would be unable to rotate troops). The British Army is effectively air defenceless.

In one of the most painful sagas of many in recent times, the Army will finally be receiving a new armoured personnel carrier, 20 years late, and with no weapon beyond a machinegun. And personnel statistics, perhaps reflecting wider society, do not make happy reading. Just five years ago, around 4,500 service personnel brought claims against the MOD.

Today the number has jumped to almost 7,000 - or roughly, one in every 17th serviceman or woman on a parade square is making a claim against the MOD. Is serving in the (smaller) non-operational Army really so dangerous? Has the MOD become more negligent in the last five years?

We can't go on like this. The first thing we must do is face reality and drop the 'world-beating' delusion.

Good, better, best

In the early 1960s, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara - America's most talented holder of the post in the second half of the 20th century - coined the phrase 'Good, better, best', in an interview with LIFE magazine. The Ford 'whizz kid' ('human IBM machine' was his other nickname) had been recruited by Kennedy to reform the bloated Department of Defence. He did, against some opposition.

'Good, better, best' referred to defence kit. The majority of defence kit, McNamara argued, just needs to be good. A small proportion needs to be better. And the smallest proportion needs to be 'the best'. The reason was cost. If each of the services proposed the best kit, every time, the defence budget would be bankrupted. Who knows what McNamara would make of Washington's trillion dollar defence budget today. His wisdom is certainly missed.

Or cheap is good enough

Or, perhaps, we could shorten McNamara's dictum and simply state cheap is good enough, most of the time. We were good at cheap. It was the foundation for what today would be called 'success stories'. The Land Rover story began in 1947 with Rover responding to a War Department requirement for a cheap, jeep-like, utility vehicle. Millions have since rolled off the production line.

In contrast, a recently procured patrol vehicle (this auth...