BEFORE the mission comes the briefing. Winds will produce a dusty haze over central Iraq. Gusts could reach 35 knots, so pilots should fly high to mitigate turbulence. The task: to proceed north of Baghdad to survey and potentially cut supply routes to a building where militants are upping production of car bombs with which to target Iraqi security forces and civilians. Can pilots confirm they are physically and mentally fit to fly?

Having done so, each enters his cockpit and is soon looking down on dusty hills and scrubland. But at the end of his working day he gets out and drives home across the boggy fens of eastern England (listening to BBC Radio 4 is the best way to decompress, confides one). For his aircraft, an MQ-9-Reaper—popularly known as a drone—is over 2,000 miles away from where he flies it: a console in a buff-coloured metal container behind camouflage netting and two barbed-wire fences in a hangar at RAF Waddington, outside Lincoln.

Drones have many advantages. One pilot cites the calm: the absence of sand in your crevices, the whirr of the engine in your ear or the whiff of hydraulic oil in your nostrils. This improves exchanges of intelligence and promotes cool-headed decisions about any use of the drone’s Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs. Most important, drones can loiter for many hours. That, says Air Commodore Jeff Portlock, chief of the RAF’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) force, offers Britain “a persistent, staring, unblinking eye in the sky”. He adds that pilots build up such an intricate picture of life on the ground that they know “what cars move on a Tuesday morning” on individual streets—and thus can tell when significant routines are being broken in territory held by, say, Islamic State.

To visit Waddington is to witness Britain’s future in the world. The absolute and relative contraction of the country’s armed forces (by 2020 the army will be one-fifth smaller than in 2010), unconventional threats like that which brought terror to the streets of Paris and Britons’ post-Iraq scepticism towards open-ended commitments are all nudging it away from large, boots-on-the-ground interventions and towards specialisms in intelligence, defence engagement (training foreign forces, for example) and limited, high-stakes raids. Or as they put it in the forces: “Go first, go fast and go home.”

The expansion of Britain’s drone fleet—on October 4th David Cameron revealed that he would double it by replacing the Reapers with 20 beefier Protectors—is at the heart of this shift. So were his announcements on November 16th that the Special Air Service (SAS) would get an extra £2 billion ($3 billion) and that spy agencies would take on some 1,900 new staff. Further indications are expected from the government’s imminent Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), its quinquennial scan of the horizon, which will shed some light on what its unexpected commitment in July to keep spending at least 2% of GDP on defence will mean for the armed forces.

This increase—amounting to a real-terms rise of 0.5% each year to 2021—probably implies that personnel cuts can be halted and equipment-spending increased. The SDSR will also reaffirm the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent and give details of how aircraft carriers under construction will be equipped and deployed. Nonetheless, despite the 2% pledge—part of which may be met by accounting jiggery-pokery—a future engagement on the scale of Iraq is almost unthinkable. It looks increasingly possible that Parliament will vote to extend Britain’s action against Islamic State to Syria (once enough Labour MPs have confirmed they are willing to defy their pacifist party leader), but a large British ground presence there is not likely.

This state of affairs is regrettable, not least as it makes it harder for the country to take the initiative and exercise international leadership. Yet short of a major expansion of its standing armed forces and a lurch in public attitudes, Britain’s evolution from a “force for change” to a “force for order” (in the words of Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank) makes sense. The country can best influence events by contributing niche, high-value forces like its drones, spies and the SAS to larger coalitions and by shaping local and regional conflicts though air support, training and peacekeeping. Doing so plays to Britain’s strengths; already, for example, it carries out about one-third of all ISR operations by the coalition against Islamic State.

Put your 0.2% where your mouth is

If Britain is to play this role—as a networked, surgical power—it should do so properly. Funding for defence and intelligence may be improving, while Britain’s vast aid budget continues to grow (to meet the UN’s target of 0.7% of GDP), but the fourth leg of the table, the diplomatic service, is wobbly. During the last government the Foreign Office was cut more than almost any other department, leaving its budget comparable to that of a city council and Britain’s spending per person on diplomacy lower than that of any similar Western country. The department’s reach, long-term planning and stock of expertise have suffered—the Ukraine crisis, for example, exposed a severe lack of regional specialists and Russian speakers.

At a time when Britain is putting ever more emphasis on its distinctive knack for gathering and disseminating knowledge, reacting quickly and forging alliances, it is odd that it should let one of its most relevant and admired global assets go to seed. A recent report (to which Bagehot contributed) published by Chatham House, another think-tank, proposed a long-term doubling of the proportional diplomatic budget to 0.2% of GDP; a totemic target to sit alongside the defence and aid ones. A savvy SDSR would pay such suggestions heed: in an age of uneasy coalitions, asymmetric threats and scrambles for information, the word in the ear can be as decisive as the gun in the hand.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot