Armed forces face 20% cut in trained personnel, thinktank warns

Severe pressures on the defence budget, compounded by the rising costs of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, could lead to a 20% cut in the number of Britain's trained armed forces personnel, a leading military and security thinktank warned today. The number of trained military personnel could fall from 175,000 to little more than 140,000 by 2016 as major cuts become "inevitable", said Prof Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute. His report comes as the government prepares to publish a green paper on defence. The paper, however, will only set out general policy options in general terms; any hard decisions will have to wait until after the general election, defence officials say. The next six years were likely to see a cut in the defence budget of between 10% and 15% in real terms ‑ taking inflation into account ‑ Chalmers, a leading defence economist, predicted. He said: "If cutbacks are evenly spread, ground formations (including infantry, armour, artillery and support regiments) would have to fall from 97 to 79, available aircraft (fixed wing and rotary) would be reduced from 760 to 615, and major vessels (submarines, carriers, escorts and major supply ships) would fall from 57 to 46." He continued: "The central question for this year's defence review will be whether some of these capabilities should be protected at the expense of deeper cuts in others." Since Britain is committed to intense operations in Afghanistan until at least 2011, Chalmers warned of a "strong temptation to postpone the hard choices" in the promised post-election defence review, with the emphasis only on a short-term balancing of the defence budget. The report warned that such an option would probably mean that the MoD would face a further "mini-review" during 2012-13, with all the uncertainties this would create. "Politically, the choice between these two options may depend on an assessment of whether it is better to incur the political pain of defence cuts all at once, or in successive smaller doses," he said in his report, Capability Cost Trends: implications for the defence review. "In strategic terms, the choice may hinge on whether longer-term defence priorities can be agreed while the broader consequences of the Afghanistan operation remain so uncertain," Chalmers concluded. An MoD spokesman said it welcomed the Rusi's contribution to the debate. "Like all departments, the Ministry of Defence is facing challenging financial circumstances," he said.