Defence now has an excellent shopping list, but what are we cooking?

In 2013 we had Stephen Smith's effort (neat lettering but handed in late - go to the back of the class, Stephen). By 2016, Marise Payne was producing her attempt (big words and no spelling mistakes - four stars Marise). Now, however, you can throw her attempt to describe the world into the bin with confidence, because Linda Reynolds has been working solidly over the holidays (good effort, Linda!) and, because every child must have their prize, has been rewarded with a newly published document she can call her very own.

It is, unfortunately, one that shows she's very much the chef's apprentice rather than the cook. It's a terrific shopping list: meat, chicken and fish, but absolutely no indication of what might be on the menu for dinner, let alone how the ingredients will work together to make a meal. It's not MasterChef. Instead, there's a little bit of this, some of that, but far more critically absolutely no idea of how it will come together - let alone how we'll pay for it all at the end of the night.

Working to a budget forces you to plan ahead, because you discard what's not necessary. There's no sense of that here. Reynolds has created a help-yourself buffet instead of the trim and terrific balanced diet our forces need.

The big new initiative is missiles and this is where Reynolds has got it, brilliantly, right. She knows technology is changing the military world and appears to be signalling a significant, even radical, departure from the structures of the past. Unsurprisingly, this former (Reserve) Brigadier understands, way better than any of her predecessors, how war is being transformed. The old ways of doing things, the planes, tanks and ships of previous white papers, are no longer capable, and increasingly being turned into nothing more than target practice for newer, more lethal weapons systems. What we require today is more of the sleek, long-range missiles and units capable of addressing specific threats, instead of bland, all-purpose, interchangeable units that have developed incrementally but share the same gene pool as the formations of World War II.

"Aha," you think, "here is someone who really gets it!"

But that's where the radical thinking ends. Instead of any plan to develop our own expertise, we're simply told to pay the bill that's being handed to us by US industrial behemoths. Oh, and we're still getting the "future" frigates, even though they'll be obsolete by the time they're built.

A little cyber with that? Yes, that would be nice too, wouldn't it. And some space equipment? Well, why not.

This document's spending splurge makes the expenditure on JobKeeper look, by comparison, like a targeted effort of tight restraint. The most beautiful thing about long-term plans is you never have to deliver them, which is just as well because this is completely unaffordable.

Spout off all you want about the 1930s - that is, after all, a good decade to search for whatever particular analogy you want to buttress whatever particular point it is you want to make. What we need to understand, however, is that the current situation is extremely different. This means there is no sense of any strategy pinning the document together. How will these weapons be used, and in what way do they mesh together to provide the foundations for a strategy? No co-ordinating idea knits the new technology with the old. This makes no more sense than it did to possess two entire divisions of horsed cavalry in the order of battle back in 1939. What we need is to see how everything fits together.

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We can't here, for one simple reason: It doesn't.

Reynolds insists the future submarines form the solid basis for the entire edifice she's erecting, which is why she likes to repeat that sentence. It shows just how important they are. The only problem is the submarines don't exist anywhere other than the drawing board, and many analysts believe that by the time they're delivered, they'll be not only be massively outnumbered but obsolete as well.

Is the strategy to defend the continent or fight offshore? Will the army be used as an expeditionary force or for security tasks in the region? Will the navy's mission be supporting amphibious invasions or defending the South China Sea? Is the air force's role to protect the country from foreign missiles? If so, how will it do that?

This update raises huge questions, but answers none of them.

We all know what this is really all about.

China is the implicit threat, unnamed threat behind these spending proposals. The problem is the defence force this update creates won't stop anything - only the US alliance can do that. This isn't to suggest that we should cut back on our spending, but simply to recognise that Australia will never be capable of independently protecting this country from assault, no matter how much weaponry we acquire. This is the gaping hole at the centre of this document: the problem (rising China) is stated, but there is no obvious explanation of how this particular solution (with its huge dollop of extra spending) provides the answer.