The Royal Air Force gets another batch of shiny new Eurofighters; the army’s top soldier protests that Britain’s defence posture is still set by the cold war. It is tempting to shrug this off as a squabble between competing services. Would that were so. There is a lot more at stake here than old rivalries and amour propre.

On one level, the spat reflects a rising, and justified, indignation that the soldiers asked to fight and die in Afghanistan are being short-changed. Behind that lies the deeper concern that the government is lavishing billions of pounds on weaponry that ignores the nature of modern wars.