When Barack Obama sits down to work in the Oval Office each day, at his fingertips lies a reminder of how closely American and British military might are intertwined.
The oak desk used by generations of US presidents was built of timbers salvaged from the British gun-brig HMS Resolute, by craftsmen at Chatham dockyards in Kent - for centuries the cradle of a seafaring nation, launching many of the ships that ruled Britannia's waves. It is a proud history on which Gordon Brown will no doubt have reflected yesterday when he celebrated Britain's first Armed Forces Day in the port.
But they no longer build ships in Chatham: the shipyards that once employed thousands of skilled workers live on only in a museum. The question for Britain's next prime minister is whether its remaining defence manufacturing base will head the same way.
As this week's report by the Institute for Public Policy Research reveals, the recession, combined with changing global threats, means "big ticket" defence projects - from Britain's two new planned aircraft carriers to the F-35 joint strike fighters that go with them, from the Astute hunter-killer subs, the largest and deadliest ever built, to the Type 45 destroyer - are now being challenged at the heart of the military and political establishment.
Such questions are sensitive because they are about Britain's idea of itself. Are we still a front-rank military power? Or is it time to accept that we are a small island which cannot afford big dreams, and seek less conventional routes to influence? "If you talk to senior people in the Royal Navy, they are worried that they are going to be seen as the people in charge when it ceased to be a serious navy in global terms," said Dr Ian Kearns, deputy chair of the National Security Commission, convened by the IPPR. "Well, why isn't our aspiration to be a global leader in cyber warfare capacity, offensive and defensive? National prestige needs to be thought about in different terms."
But the fear within the armed forces is that the unspoken promise built into the Resolute desk - that Britain will always have the clout to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US, and the US will always want it to - now risks being broken.
Lord Robertson, the former Nato secretary general and commission member, argues that Obama is no longer interested in a military special relationship with the UK alone, but with a broader European alliance. "There's no doubt that the Obama administration wants Europe to be acting as a whole. It's not going to have a sweetheart relationship with any individual country."
Worse still, senior American military sources told the commission privately that they regard British forces as neither as reliable nor as good as they once were, after years of underfunding. Tensions became clear during the British withdrawal from Basra, when US marines were sent into the city to restore order while British troops stayed in their barracks. "What happened in Basra at the end did a lot of damage and that was a political decision - to run our forces down too early," said Julian Brazier, the Conservative chair of the all-party reserve forces group. "I know from a number of American colleagues that did damage our image, very unfairly to our armed forces." There are whispers in Whitehall that Brown's refusal to send more troops to Afghanistan, despite pleas from the chief of defence staff, also annoyed Washington - which was last week forced to send US troops to Helmand to reinforce the British instead.
Lord Guthrie, the former chief of defence staff and a commission member, said the fear was that "the US are beginning to wonder whether we have the stomach for it". Or, indeed, the money for it. As a result of the costs of borrowing through a recession, in five years' time the national debt is forecast to reach £1.3 trillion: the interest on that alone would outstrip the entire current defence budget.
While Brown still refuses to discuss cuts in public services, few parts of Whitehall are likely to be spared and senior Labour figures are now starting to think the unthinkable about programmes like Trident. For the Conservatives, such pressures are even more difficult to resolve.
"Defence is a sacred cow for this party. We could never go into an election without promising to provide our troops with all the kit they're lacking," says a senior frontbencher. And that is an argument that wears an all too human face.
Maureen Shearer's life changed for ever nearly four years ago, when her son, Richard, was killed in a roadside bomb near Basra. The loss, she said, opened her eyes to the human cost of miserly defence spending. "My son had to keep repairing what equipment he had. They were tired and they were being attacked relentlessly and were having to mend their equipment."
Now he is gone and, like many bereaved relatives of those lost in Iraq and Afghanistan she says her life "will never be the same". Nor does she believe her son's experience is unique. "It's not just the army, it's the navy and the air force who are also struggling. We should not fight in other countries unless we equip our forces. Of course there is no bottomless pit, but obviously we need the basics to be supplied. They have to have new vehicles and equipment before we do anything."
Snatch Land Rovers like the one Shearer's patrol was travelling in - offering pitifully flimsy defences against roadside bombs - are now being replaced by more heavily armoured vehicles, but other concerns remain, particularly over a shortage of helicopters. "One thing we should really have requested [for Afghanistan] was more support helicopters along with the training of pilots, which is also an expensive business," said Guthrie.
It is not just equipment that is suffering. The commission argues that diverting resources to the frontline has come at the expense of training: the gaps between operational tours have shrunk, meaning longer periods of separation for service people from their families.
The Ministry of Defence's latest continuous attitudes survey, a snapshot of morale in the armed forces, found that 21% of officers plan leave before the end of their current commission. Nearly half cited overstretch and scale of commitments as a reason to leave the forces: a third felt operational tours were now coming around too often.
Yet, as Guthrie admits, "no government wants to spend more on defence than it has to". The uncomfortable question is whether taxpayers, squeezed by the recession, feel the same.
Cases like that of Sergeant Steven Roberts, shot dead in Iraq days after being asked to give up his flak jacket because there were not enough to go round, raise difficult questions. His widow Samantha's campaign for better body armour aroused deep public sympathy, but also triggers difficult questions. What risks are justifiable in warfare? And how much are we prepared to pay to prevent them?
While the shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, has tirelessly highlighted the human costs of overstretch, the Tories have not explained in detail how a more generously equipped armed forces could be funded. Labour, meanwhile, shies away from scrapping big defence contracts that cost jobs in its heartlands, including Scotland where the Rosyth dockyards employ some of Brown's constituents. Guthrie believes that while ministers have avoided a real debate, "so too have the opposition".
The commission argues that only a fresh strategic defence review, examining security budgets across Whitehall can rise above such political considerations and answer the big questions.
Kearns said he was struck by how much spending was dictated by fierce inter-service rivalry and not long-term strategic thinking: "They get into a position of saying, 'Well, if the air force is getting a Typhoon then it's the navy's turn next', so they go for the aircraft carriers ... There is a case for knocking heads together." Professor Paul Cornish, head of the international security programme at the Chatham House thinktank, argues such rivalries have also weakened the MoD's ability to plead its case inside government. "You can see the Treasury chiefs thinking, 'They can't decide anything because they are all at each other's throats, so let's decide ourselves'."
Yet the debate, he argues, should be "at the level of ideas and not at the level of the invoice".
While the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has called for Trident to be scrapped to save money, for now Labour and the Tories will admit only to seeking creative ways to do more with less. "Everyone knows they're broke. It's about where the money is spent and what operations we get involved in," said Brazier.
Fox is looking at options, including redeploying service personnel currently "flying desks" in civilian jobs at the MoD to the frontline. Labour seeks efficiency savings but also privately looking to Europe, where Robertson argues that immense theoretical firepower- 2.5 million troops, more fast jets than the Americans - too rarely makes it out of the barracks.
"You have got countries like Germany with 320,000 in their armed forces of whom they can deploy probably 9,000 - the deployment rate in European armies is a scandalous waste," he said.
But what also prevents Europe playing a bigger role is that - not for the first time - some of its governments are still fighting the wrong war. It is a lesson drummed into every fledgling military historian: how Hitler's tanks overran the cavalries at the beginning of the second world war. Seventy years later, Kearns argues that we face another pivotal moment, with the MoD buying weapons devised in another era for another foe.
"We have got to make sure we are not spending all of our resources recruiting the cavalry and then discovering that the opposition have got a whole new load of kit and are fighting in a whole new way," he says. What use is an aircraft carrier against a cyber attack that can cripple a government overnight by crashing the computers controlling its banks, vital utilities, hospitals and other critical state systems - the electronic equivalent of a nuclear bomb?
Wars of the future, the report argues, are likely to be fought among civilians in highly populated cities, rendering weapons designed for the big battlefield useless. The major threat will not be from domineering powers, like Nazi Germany or Soviet-era Russia, but from failing states whose implosion is exploited by others, like modern Pakistan and from non-state actors like terrorists.
And if enemies change, so will allies. Demographic shifts in the US, including an expanding Hispanic population, may cause it to look increasingly south to Latin America, and east, to the emerging powers of China and India, rather than across the Atlantic. So where does that leave Britain's Trident independent nuclear deterrent? The ageing Vanguard submarines that carry it need replacing, at an estimated cost of up to £25bn - although, as Robertson points out, scrapping it would also lead to "massive upfront costs" as a result of the difficulty of decommissioning a nuclear weapons system and its associated bases.
But Labour MPs are preparing for a fight ahead of initial procurement decisions to be made in September, arguing the recession has changed the terms on which parliament backed its replacement. Brown has already signalled Britain will reduce the number of Trident warheads as a gesture towards next year's critical international talks on decommissioning. Ministers argue privately that even if Britain was minded to scrap on the programme, it would wreck our negotiating hand to say so; better to keep it as a bargaining chip to draw concessions from others.
Nonetheless, opposition to Trident extends beyond the far left. Even Des Browne - who as defence secretary pushed it through parliament - hints there may be new room for manoeuvre, citing recent research at Bradford university which has identified possible alternatives. "I was persuaded at the time that it had to be Trident. But I never was a person with a closed mind about this issue," he says. Browne defends the purchase of the two aircraft carriers questioned by the commission as "essential", however, and argues a new defence review could simply be used to kick difficult decisions into the long grass. The Obama administration, he points out, has already started stripping back its defence budget and scrapping expensive contracts.
But the main obstacle to axing any major defence programmes, particularly Trident, is fear. No prime minster wants to be remembered as the one who left the nation defenceless.
James Arbuthnot, chair of the Commons defence select committee and the man tipped by some as a future Conservative defence secretary, warns against complacency in assuming conventional warfare is a thing of the past. He believes the risks from Pakistan in particular - which is a nuclear power - cannot be underestimated.
"In Afghanistan and Pakistan we have the most unstable region in the world, which has because of the Pakistani community in this country a direct link [to Britain] and it also has nuclear weapons - all of that adds up to the most important issue this country is facing today," he says. "Yet we are still devoting only 2% of GDP to defending ourselves. I think that's something the country needs to think about."
It may not be a debate either of the two major parties seems anxious to have before the election. But when the Iraq war inquiry begins, and the families of dead soldiers tell their stories, a debate about the true cost of defending Britain may no longer be contained.
Poor Provision
Sue Smith's son, Philip Hewitt, was 21 when he was killed near Basra in July 2005. His mother believes that no armed forces should be asked to fight wars if recruits do not have the necessary equipment and protection.
You can't do a job without the tools. There has to be better investment or the decision has to be made not to go to other conflicts," she says. "There will always be other conflicts going on somewhere, and the government might have to resist sending troops in the future."
Smith, from Tamworth, Staffordshire, believes her son's death could have been avoided had British troops been better equipped. She has threatened to take legal action against the government for sending troops to Iraq without the right equipment.
The inquest into Hewitt's death revealed the bomb that killed her son entered his Snatch Land Rover through a window covered only with steel mesh. More than 35 soldiers have been killed in Snatches in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.
"I am very disappointed. Our soldiers are too quickly forgotten. Boys have died who might be alive if they had better funding. The attitude remains that a soldier is just a soldier. Action men might look the part, but simply looking good is not nearly enough.
The Defence Bill
• Britain spends just over 2% of its GDP on defence, down from over 4% in the mid-1980s, following the Falklands war. America spends just over 3%.
• In 2007-08, defence spending totalled over £37.4bn.
• The MoD's most infamous big-ticket project was probably the Eurofighter jet. Delivered 10 years late and £5.4bn over budget, it was outdated by 2006.
• Troop numbers fell from 101,360 full time personnel in 1997 to 99,460 in 2007: the Navy has lost eight destroyers and six frigates.
• Trident alone swallows up to 5.5 % of the defence budget.
• Since Labour came to power the British armed forces have served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, plus peacekeeping duties in Northern Ireland and anti-piracy operations in Somalia.
The program is not new, and the 
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