By IRNA,
London : Britain’s armed forces would be no longer able to mount the kind of military operations conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan due to the scale of cuts announced in the government’s strategic defence review, analysts have said.
They added that it would also be impossible to deploy the kind of carrier taskforce sent to liberate the Falklands Islands in the war against Argentina in 1982.
According to new defense planning assumptions, UK forces would be able to carry out one brigade-level operation with up to 6,500 personnel, compared to the 10,000 now in Afghanistan, plus two smaller interventions, at any one time.
Such would be the scale of defense cuts announced by Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday, it may be possible to mount ‘with sufficient warning’ a one-off, time-limited major intervention of up to three brigades of 30,000 personnel, two-thirds of the force deployed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But the review ruled out the possibility of Britain ever mounting a major independent operation again, saying that future wars would be fought alongside allies like the US and France.
The cuts included a 17,000 reduction in the armed forces together with 25,000 civilian jobs at the Ministry of Defence with the annual budget of £30 billion cut by 8% over the next four years.
The existing fleet of Harriers would be scrapped immediately and an as yet unknown number of US Joint Strike Fighters due to replace them would not be ready for another 10 years. The long-delayed Nimrod MRA4 maritime reconnaissance aircraft is also being abandoned.
While the existing HMS Ark Royal aircraft carrier is being immediately scrapped, two new super carriers would not be ready by 2020, with at least one being possibly mothballed without an aircraft having ever flown from it.
A decision on replacing the existing fleet of four Trident nuclear missile submarines was delayed until after the next general election, due in 2015, but as part of a ‘value for money’ exercise, the number of warheads aboard each sub would be reduced from 48 to 40.