Any reader of books or articles on British defence policy in the period since 1945 is likely to be struck by the consensus which seems to exist about the general trend and direction of that policy. Titles like The long retreat, The long recessional and The collapse of British power reveal a commonly held view that the United Kingdom's postwar security policy has been characterized by a continuous process of contraction and decline. 1 The reader is left with the strong impression that British defence policy in the postwar world is a depressing story of withdrawal from Empire, concentration first on Europe, then within it, declining financial and manpower resources, and reductions in equipment. There also s'eems to be agreement on a further point: that this decline in the United Kingdom's military power has been forced upon successive governments by the continuous deterioration of the economy over the same period. The economy, however, is not the only villain of the piece: Labour governments, with a predilection for well-advertised defence reviews and cuts in defence expenditure, are also frequently thought to share much of the responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. Whether this is a true and fair reflection of the evolution of British defence policy is a question which has until recently received little attention. Although British spending on defence has increased in the 1980s, the conventional picture of 'an ideology of failure' continues to be widely reflected in current defence literature, and appears to be accepted equally widely by most commentators and laymen.2 Since 1974, however, one particular commentator has attempted a reassessment which challenges the conventional wisdom on nearly every point. David Greenwood, director of the Centre for Defence Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and a leading defence economist, has written a series of articles criticizing many of the assumptions of writers such as W. P. Snyder, R. Rosecrance, C. J. Bartlett and L. W. Martin, whose work has dominated the study of postwar British defence policy.3