It would be a little melodramatic to suggest that Daly's final advancement in the profession of arms – to chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee – was one further, and perhaps the final, casualty of the ‘civic action crisis’. As we have seen, Daly himself was mentally exhausted and physically unwell by the time he left the post of Chief of the General Staff and the army in the middle of 1971 and had made it clear that he lacked the desire to take on the top job in any case. In Vice-Admiral Sir Victor Smith there was, as well, an able alternative choice who had the advantage of being from a different service, and he held the post until November 1975. Speculation as to how Daly would have discharged further high office serves little useful purpose, although he might have found working with the Whitlam Government as challenging as anything he had experienced in the political domain of the second half of the 1960s.

His final meeting of the Military Board convened on 14 May 1971. As was customary, the Minister, Andrew Peacock, spoke of the achievements of the retiring CGS in what seems to have been a lengthy and genuinely effusive tribute. It was, said Peacock, ‘a period characterised by the innumerable problems and difficulties associated with an operationally committed and expanding Army’, and Daly's carriage of his duties had been characterised by ‘his fine qualities of wisdom and perceptiveness and…the very human manner in which he had always discharged the onerous responsibilities of his position’. His had been ‘a most distinguished and dedicated military career…[of] outstanding service to the Nation, as well as the Army as a whole’. Daly in turn expressed his thanks and characteristically paid equal tribute to ‘the corporate wisdom and experience’ of the board itself and spoke of his ‘immense pride and satisfaction’ at his association with it. A newspaper comment on the selection of a successor to Wilton the previous year had noted ‘the tremendous affection within the Army’ in which Daly was held, and the farewell tribute from his most senior colleagues certainly reflected this. Peacock greeted his successor, Lieutenant-General M.F. Brogan, to his first Military Board meeting a fortnight later in much the same manner as Fraser had welcomed Daly back in 1966: he would find ‘the duties of his new office both challenging and stimulating’.