Military Budget

RAF and navy hardest hit by £4.5bn MoD cuts· Overstretched armed services facing crisis

Treasury proposals to cut £4.5bn from the defence budget over the next three years will be discussed by senior civil servants and military chiefs this week amid warnings that the armed forces are overstretched and facing a crisis.

The cuts are described by a Whitehall insider as the largest since the end of the cold war, and have provoked private fury from military chiefs. They say Britain's soldiers are not properly equipped and are deployed on too many fronts including Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.

A senior MoD official has warned that the existing equipment is "unaffordable", that the ministry is heading for a "train crash", and that a budget squeeze risks "mortgaging the future" of the armed forces.

Internal MoD documents show that the armed forces will get a real cash increase of just 0.6% this coming financial year, significantly less than the 1.5% annual average rise over the next three years quoted by ministers. Even the higher figure would have meant cuts of more than £1bn a year.

The squeeze on the defence budget is even more severe because the cost of weapons systems is increasing much more than the costs of other goods and services, defence officials say.

Its crazy, the British government has comitted our armed forces in two major conflicts yet they want to cut the defense budget. Either the government fully commits money to it and we like turn into Prussia or we pull out and reduced our military to a Scandanavian model, a token force with perhaps a special ops section. The government is living in fantasy land if it thinks it can do war's on the cheap.

Britain is living beyond its means and its military commitments far outweight our relative importance in the grand scheme of things. We're a two bit ex imperial backwater and we need to stop behaving like we're still a major world power, we ain't and the sooner we accept this reality the better we will be.