'Defence'

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has announced that there will be 2,600 redundancies among serving personnel over the next six months and a personnel reduction (mostly by redundancy) of 17,000 by April 2015.

There will, of course, be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth; historic tradition, camaraderie, commitments to NATO, punching above our weight in the world, da da da da.

However, I am tempted to see this in a positive light. The last figures I have, for August 2010, show 194,440 regular troops, 39,420 volunteer forces and 191,300 regular reserves. That makes just over 425,000 military, which with our sophisticated kit and fourth largest military defence budget in the world, gives us the second highest power projection capability in the world, after America.

This is far, far too high. Indeed it is a wonder we have allowed the euphemism ‘Defence’ at all: it is an attack force, a power projection force, and we can’t afford it, even if it were desirable to have it, which I doubt.

There is a proviso, though. One of the reasons I don’t own a screwdriver is so that no one asks me to do any repairs or ‘do it yourself’. You cannot, however make dramatic cuts to military personnel while continually engaging in these foreign adventures, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It is like me developing a passion for putting up shelves.

Against that, 17,000 would be a cut of 4%, which doesn’t look awful.