What are your thoughts on Army 2020?

Not quite sure how much sense it makes to reduce our armed forces so drastically. Wouldn't it have been better to reduce the Navy rather than the Army considering Afghanistan (and other such countries) are hot, dry, and land locked? Although I admit I don't know exactly what the Navy's role in Afghanistan is, apart from that of the Royal Marines.

Philip Hammond seems to be a penny pinching politician who knows absolutely nothing about military matters. I would take him about 67x more seriously if he had actually been in the forces and therefore had first hand experience of the people/equipment he is in charge of. If there was a major threat to the UK in the next 5-10 years, what exactly would HM Government do? I'm sure the remaining 82,000 people in the Army wouldn't all be infantry and wouldn't all be able to deploy at the same time. I guess we'll have to go running to America or (urgh) Europe depending on where the threat comes from.

I understand that cuts have to be made in order for us as a country to be living within our means but I seriously doubt whether the cuts to the armed forces have actually been properly thought out or whether several high powered people have simply sat in a Whitehall office with a dartboard and a few darts.

Not 100% why the Scottish regiments seem to have got off so lightly without being cut. Why didn't the Army just take people who volunteered for redundancy up on the offer rather than making people I know redundant when they didn't want to be? The whole thing seems to be a bit of a mess to me.

I'm hoping to join in a few years, so for now I'm crossing my fingers that they leave the AMS well alone.

We should cut the defence budget to 0 and only spend enough to maintain our nuclear arsenal. That's all the defence we need really.

Not quite sure how much sense it makes to reduce our armed forces so drastically. Wouldn't it have been better to reduce the Navy rather than the Army considering Afghanistan (and other such countries) are hot, dry, and land locked? Although I admit I don't know exactly what the Navy's role in Afghanistan is, apart from that of the Royal Marines.

The first UK Force that went into Afghanistan at the start of our action there was RN. And if you intend on joining the military medical services, you'll soon find out that just about every unit is joint forces, with personnel from the Army, the RAF and the RN sharing the duties.

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Find it a little bit concerning that you describe 'occupying lesser nations' as a reason to need a strong military.

Russia is probably the only nation that I would concede has sufficient geographic proximity, size and inclination to present a serious conventional militarily threat to us, but it's really an issue for NATO to handle as a whole. Let's be honest in the extremely unlikely event of an actual conventional war our conventional forces would have very limited impact compared to those of Poland or Germany. Plus Russia only actually spends slightly more than either us or France individually on defence - and that has to cover its entire vast territory.

As for the last bit I don't think we need a big military to do counter terrorism or peacekeeping. Nor does it need to be particularly well equipped. We might have to bin the idea of operations of the type and scale of Afghanistan and Iraq, but tbh I think most people would acknowledge that as a good thing.

Really though the army has been over-emphasised past decade, defence budget should be spent on navy then airforce.

Army should be relegated to territorial defence force.

Why?

Because with a strict definition of the term 'defence' then our interests are best served by an expansive Navy - we are an island after all - and Air Force capable of covering our interests around the world, with a minimum strength Army for those hopefully rare land incursions.

Though that does ignore the element of the Royal Navy that would also be expanded - the Royal Marines, giving us potent amphibious/land forces without a big Army.

Damn, i can't rep you anymore...you keep hitting the nail on the head..are you in the forces by any chance?

As for the last statement... yeah, most would agree that we shouldn't do that kind of thing, certainly not if following the mould of what went before, but that does not mean our Forces won't get used for those kind of actions. The various Governments of the last 10-15yrs have all said they wanted to cut the Forces, to use them less across the world and only when of necessity... but then there they are throwing them at every problem. It's all well and good our Gov talking a good game, but then they change their mind and send them across the world despite the cuts. Those two actions don't add up.

Used to be. Intelligence, RAF.

Have to say I agree with this paragraph, of course my solution would be to stop sending them to conflicts that there's no good reason to fight, but I more than sympathise with Armed forces that are told they don't need as much funding while they're engaged in a continuous series of overseas conflicts.

But no doubt - we'll make these changes for a light, fast insurgency-fighting war force in hot and mountainous Afghanistan....and then find ourselves in ten or twenty years time fighting a conventional war in essentially temperate conditions in Korea, and wonder where all our tanks and air defence went.

I think it is a good place to make cuts. Perhaps future governments will be less likely to start illegal wars in far-off lands if we don't have the troops to commit?

The UK already has the fourth largest defence budget globally and yet we are a small island nation in a stable region of the world. The purpose of war is for national defence, but we haven't fought to defend our territory since the Falklands; and that relied largely on the navy and air support not the army.

And therein lies the difficulty of Defence planning. You can speculate and speculate but at some point you've got to roll the dice.

Well yeah but that's a very narrow definition of 'defence'. That's just a reactionary 'we'll let crap go on outside and just wait until it bites us in the ass'. The problem is what occurs elsewhere in a globalised world has plenty of opportunity to affect us these days. Just like what happened in the 90s, when we sat around and let Yugoslavia tear itself to pieces because we couldn't be arsed, then both us and America half arsed attempts to get Bin Laden. The results of those decisions were genocide in Yugoslavia and 9/11. Another example of that would be the 'Glorious Isolation' of the late 19th century when we refused to interact with anything outside of the British Empire sitting behind our navy and when we finally stumbled out of that, we discovered the world had fundamentally changed to our detriment and had we had to shack up in a disastrous alliance with the French to offset what Germany had grown into while we hid behind our navy for nearly thirty years.

The navy could do sod all about a terrorist who has spent the last five years training in a failed state coming across and blowing up a dirty bomb in the centre of London. If we have evidence of such stuff happening abroad that directly affects our safety then we need an air force and army to tackle those threats. This isn't the 18th century anymore.