By any sane rationale, the most urgent task facing a responsible British government today should be to take radical measures to reverse the relentless decline in the scale of our armed forces after the devastation wrought by successive defence reviews in the past two decades.
Instead, a report by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) has suggested defence spending could be cut by a further 10 per cent during the next parliament. In practical terms that would mean the Regular Army, currently being reduced from 102,000 to a desperately inadequate 82,000, would lose a further 40 per cent of manpower and would amount to around 50,000. That would represent the British Army’s lowest strength in almost 250 years....


...The striking phenomenon of the past two decades has been that, as Britain has stripped away its military capability, it has engaged in ever more conflicts.

The Prime Minister vowed the West would be “staunch” in its response to Russian aggression and was prepared to maintain pressure on Moscow “for the long term”

A new programme of defence co-operation between the UK and France has been announced by British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy today, Tuesday 2 November 2010.

The UK and France have agreed to strengthen defence co-operation following a summit at RAF Brize Norton today.

And it is clear that the general elections in the UK and the implementation of the next Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) will give rise to a particularly difficult context in so far as concerns the preparation of the Brussels discussions in June 2015, in particular with regard to defence industrial perspectives.