WASHINGTON, July 22 (UPI) -- Britain's Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is not slashing its armed forces but it has decided to trim them.
Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon announced Wednesday cuts to his nation's fabled Royal Air Force, Navy and Army to streamline the three services and equip them better to face the far more complex but ever more deadly threats of the 21st century. The moves are also designed to save $5.2 billion in all by 2008.
Hardest hit in terms of manpower is the Royal Air Force, which is being cut from 48,500 men to 41,000, a manpower reduction of more than 15 percent. It will also lose a full four squadrons of aging and expensive Jaguar and Tornado bomber aircraft.
The Royal Navy gets off relatively light in terms of manpower although it will lose no less than 12 of its older warships from an already small surface fleet, including three of its beloved Type 42 destroyers. But they are more than 35 years old.
However, Britain is pressing ahead with at least two more aircraft carriers to boost its global force projection which in many respects is now exceeded only by the United States in the current balance of world maritime power.
Aircraft carriers are sitting ducks if deployed close to the coastlines of nations with huge air forces like Russia and China, or if they are at the mercy of fast, nuclear-powered attack submarines. But for the many peacekeeping operations and small-scale wars around the world that Britain and the United States have both fought highly successfully since Britain's 1982 victory over Argentina in the Falklands, they remain unequalled for projecting overwhelming high tech power.
In manpower terms, Britain's Army also gets off lightly from Hoon's reforms, losing only 2,600 men from its current overall strength of 104,000. But the changes there have already set off the biggest popular and political storms.
Hoon proposes to scrap four battalions of the regular Army, numbering 2,600 troops in all, or 650 per battalion. But that will involve ending or retiring some of the great military traditions inherited from the fabled old regiments of the British Army, especially the famous Scottish Black Watch. Therefore, although the manpower reductions involved are quite small, indeed miniscule by U.S. or Russian standards they would destroy fabled regimental traditions going back hundreds of years.
This is no small thing as the outstanding excellence, high morale and exceptional professionalism of the British Army since World War II has been based precisely on the cherished traditions and tight-knit ties between officers and men, and current and past generations of fighting troops in such elite regiments.
Conservative Party lawmakers have already zeroed in on these proposed cuts, the largest the Army has seen since the grim days of the 1960s -- again under a Labour government. Nicholas Soames, the Conservative defense spokesman and the grandson of Winston Churchill called the cuts "extraordinary."
In a Transatlantic echo of recent and current defense debates in Washington, some critics argued that the cuts came at a time when Britain's troops were already dangerously over-stretched owing to their unexpectedly long and manpower-heavy deployment in southern Iraq as America's only major military ally on the ground there.
Another Conservative, Patrick Mercer called the cuts "an act of madness created by financial strictures rather than any sort of tactical analysis."
But Britain's army also feels the pull of post Cold War and post-imperial overstretch in its many peacekeeping commitments stretching from Bosnia and Kosovo to Sierra Leone to Afghanistan to Iraq.
Ironically it is Iraq, the same country that has siphoned off so disproportionately much of the Army's active manpower that is responsible for the cuts in the first place.
Far from slashing spending on Britain's armed forces Hoon and Chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance minister Gordon Brown have actually significantly boosted spending on the armed forces by 1.4 percent a year over the next few years in real terms. Brown financed the increase by imposing huge manpower cuts on Britain's domestic Civil Service or national government bureaucracy announced in his budget.
However, so great is the cost of Britain's continued Iraq commitment that, like a malign tumor, it is weakening the armed forces overall and forcing government ministers to make significant cuts elsewhere in order to continue financing it.
This fact also undermines the effectiveness of the attacks that the Conservatives are making on the new cuts. For almost all of them were eagerly in favor of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and of Britain going in there as America's primary military ally.
Hoon's changes are by no means only destructive. He hopes to restructure the army to put its emphasis on fast, mobile regiments that can be deeply far faster to trouble spots around the world, and that have plenty of heavy artillery for hitting power.
This at the very least indicates a new military doctrine drawn up by Hoon's Ministry of Defense planners that is realistically attuned to Britain's capabilities as an intermediate but still impressive and cost-effective international military power.
This doctrine and Hoon's reforms are also far more decisive and focused in their overall strategy and implementation than U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's record after three and a half years in office when he also wanted to streamline and restructure America's admittedly vastly larger and more complex armed forces.
Any major restructuring of armed forces or approval of ambitious future defense plans always comprises a huge gamble. For future wars have a way of always confounding the most confident predictions of how they would be fought.
But in terms of what is actually known and what can realistically be done with the resources available, Hoon appears to have done a skilful job of trying to redirect his country's military assets for dealing with the challenges they are already facing.
