Analysis: Looming axe for those risking their lives is mental cruelty

ONLY in Treasury-ruled Britain could anyone involved in two major wars in Afghanistan and Libya - and until very recently a third in Iraq be contemplating major redundancies in its Armed Forces.

Where the aim surely is to win both and when you don't have a blind clue what is round the next corner (such as in the distant but potentially rich Falkland Islands), would it not be safer to proceed at a snail's pace until you are absolutely sure at least one of the conflicts is finally over?

Apparently, not a course of action being contemplated by the Treasury or the doughty Dr Fox who shows all the twitching signs of a man who knows better and is determined to press on regardless (when in truth he should be considering his own position).

Telling someone they are no longer needed takes sensitivity at the best of times, especially if they have risked their neck on the country's behalf.

Telling them when they do not know whether tomorrow or the next day might see them leaving Helmand Province in a body bag headed for the (back) gate of RAF Brize Norton is not far short of mental cruelty and ought to be resisted at all costs. Morale is a fragile flower at the best of times and easily trampled on, yet is the paramount factor enabling commanders to win countless small battles which ultimately add up to victory in war.

Neither are looking particularly assured right now in terror-racked Kabul or Gaddafi-ruled Tripoli, irrespective of any announcements about officer and soldier redundancies in our already shrunken and overstretched Armed Forces. Such pronouncements seem to be jaw-saggingly disconnected from even the faintest reality of the life-sapping situation on the ground in both these countries, which are surrounded by a raging Arab Spring which no-one yet knows will mellow into summer or back to winter.

All of us know only too well, and for our own long-term good, how the country must be seen by international markets to be cutting its huge burden of debt, the Armed Forces included.

Nevertheless, how you manage change is critical and the constant slash and burn fag ends dropping from Dr Fox's lips are having an undoubted adverse effect, not only on the bridge but down in the engine room as well.

Indeed, were it not for the turgid jobs market outside, Dr Fox might find himself the only man left to switch the lights out on leaving Whitehall.

You finish the battle before you send the soldiers home to turn swords into ploughshares. Not the other way round.

• Clive Fairweather is a former infantry battalion commanding officer