The Defence White Paper will come with a big sales pitch — that it is the most researched, consulted, considered and costed plan in at least 16 years.

Australian taxpayers who fund the $32 billion (and growing) annual defence budget can only hope it matches the hype, because recent white papers have had an uncanny knack of "missing" major conflicts that have drawn thousands of men and women into military operations around the globe.

2000 Defence White Paper

The 2000 Defence White Paper contained the word "terrorist" only four times. A year later, in New York and Washington, Al Qaeda was to prove with tragic effect, how much Australian and other Western military thinkers had missed.

So stretched was the military dealing with the consequences in Afghanistan and Iraq that it took another nine years to attempt a white paper, and in that period terrorists would wreak carnage in London, Madrid, Bali, Jakarta and Mumbai.

2009 Defence White Paper

When it came in 2009, the paper came with a disclaimer: "Major strategic surprises are always possible, and strategic shocks should be expected at some stage over the foreseeable future … It would be unwise to act on the basis that there is no credible risk of the international environment changing."

Which is a handy way to say, "there is a good chance we might have missed something here".

Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd meets with US President Barack Obama. ( Howard Moffat: AAP/Auspic )

The 2009 white paper came at a time when Barack Obama was in the Oval Office, when Kevin Rudd was in the Lodge and when America's "rebalance" to the Asia-Pacific was looking like a good way to justify withdrawal from the Middle East.

Again hedging its bets, the 2009 outlook noted that "the Middle East will remain violent over the period to 2030" — but there was nothing to suggest an Arab Spring was on the cards or that Sunni-Shia conflict would wash blood through Iraq and Syria within the next decade.

2013 Defence White Paper

This had been rectified by the 2013 white paper, delivered in the shadows of an election and what would become a change of government in Australia.

That white paper was clearly onto something when it alerted readers that "centres of export of terrorist activity, mainly Yemen, Lebanon, the Sahel and now Syria, will increasingly affect Australia's security, including through experience and training given to individuals there".

Defence had diagnosed a problem, but others in the security and border control establishment had failed to find the remedy in time to prevent what now stands at an estimated 110 Australians being drawn into the ranks of middle-eastern foreign fighting militia, including Islamic State.

Likewise, Defence gave no hint in its 2013 white paper that a return to United Arab Emirates, Iraq and the skies above Syria might be on the cards two years later, when the Abbott Government would agree to join a western coalition trying to counter Islamic State's rapid advance east and south from northern Syria.

A member loyal to the Islamic State waves an ISIS flag in Raqqa, Syria. ( Reuters )

Looking forward to the 2016 White Paper

No one could reasonably expect Defence planners to "predict" with any accuracy the currents of human conflict across the globe — and hindsight is a perspective not afforded to them.

But there will still be a tendency to view the 2016 Defence White Paper — and its careful, methodical and consultative preparation — as an official version of the "truth" on the national and global security outlook.

Many billions of dollars will be invested in Defence thinkers getting the strategic outlook roughly about right.

People, planes, ships, guns and vehicles will be paid for to counter the likely threats the planners identify.

Despite their best endeavours, the history of these exercises suggests they will almost certainly "miss" something.