It was with dismay that I read the Royal United Services Institute’s projections that our trained military personnel could be reduced by 35,000 by 2016. The RUSI points to rapidly increasing troop and equipment costs as the reason behind the potential scaling back of our military strength. Whilst many may see this is necessary taking into account the financial climate in which we find ourselves, I am strongly of the belief that defence is an area that cannot simply be squeezed in order to balance the books. It is my experience that once something is scaled back in the name of ‘efficiency savings’, it is rarely reversible.
So how will the government react to RUSI’s assessment that we are facing a 20% reduction in trained military personnel? Not I fear with the same foreboding that I and many leading military experts have. Labour will see these cuts as a necessary evil in order to sustain our current commitments in the short term. Whilst I agree that ensuring that our forces in Afghanistan and other areas of active deployment are adequately equipped, I would suggest that such an approach is dangerously short sighted.
Should these cuts be implemented they will represent just one example in a long list of failures in military planning. In 2004 the government took the reckless decision to cut the helicopter budget by £1.4bn. This was at a time when the gravity of our commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq were becoming apparent. We are now faced with a grave situation in which military personnel have lost their lives as a direct result of the lack of available helicopters. It examples like this that demonstrate that Labour has no concern for Britain’s long term strategic capabilities or the well being its fighting men and women.
The Conservatives have pledged to conduct a fresh strategic defence review should they win the next election, the last one having been completed in 1998. I sincerely hope that such a review would recognise that cutting the defence budget, whilst perhaps fiscally prudent, is risking Britain’s security and prosperity in an increasingly destabilised world. Furthermore we should no longer aim to ensure that our servicemen and women are ‘adequately equipped’, but rather instead strive to see that they are equipped with the best equipment possible. I believe that such a goal is the least that we owe those we place in harms way.
