Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has always enjoyed a somewhat mild manner in public. But he has just unveiled an overhaul of the Pentagon’s annual defence budget that is causing anguished squealing in Congress and the nation’s defence-industrial complex. Mr Gates’s overhaul does not entail any reduction in the Pentagon’s mammoth $534bn annual budget. But it brings cutbacks in a string of traditional military programmes that big name defence contractors have long cherished.

Mr Gates is reshaping the Pentagon budget with one goal in mind. He believes that the US, given the scale of the financial crisis, does not have unlimited resources with which to fight every kind of war; and that the Pentagon procurement system does not always buy the kind of weapons the country needs, anyway. In short, he believes the US needs more resources to fight insurgencies of the kind we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fewer to fight conventional wars against big nations such as China and Russia that will probably never take place.