In the firing line

With Britain now at war for longer than the Second World War and incurring a greater loss of lives than in the Falklands, defence remains a contentious area of policy. It is, however, unlikely to come into focus until after the election, when there will be pressure for the defence budget to be cut in line with general public expenditure – by as much as 20 per cent. That will undoubtedly be reflected in this summer's Strategic Defence Review, the first for more than ten years.

TALKING POINTS:

1 AFGHANISTAN: While the Liberals and SNP fiercely denounced the decision to invade Iraq, Afghanistan has always been seen as a "moral war" in the context of 9/11. However, differences in approach are beginning to emerge, with Labour and the Tories reluctantly in for the long haul, even though former Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram concedes that "Karzai has been stunning everyone with his pronouncements recently". The SNP, meanwhile, is striking an increasingly sceptical stance on the conflict, arguing that it's time for a review in which withdrawal is an explicit option. "It's got to the stage where we need to ask whether we can justify our young men dying for the Karzai regime, a government whose legitimacy is in question and which is so self-evidently linked with nepotism and corruption," says SNP defence spokesman Angus Robertson. "Is this really what we signed up for?"

2 STRATEGIC DEFENCE REVIEW: This summer, the first Strategic Defence Review (SDR) for more than a decade will focus on the shape of future conflicts. The status quo is unaffordable, so there are basically two choices: cutting manpower or a reduction in technological sophistication of armaments. The key issue is whether insurgency-led conflicts will make up the bulk of the military's work as the Army believes, or whether Britain will face conventional conflicts against recognised nation states, as the RAF and Royal Navy maintain.

3 THE SHAPE OF CUTS: Cuts will come whatever the conclusions of the SDR. A radical proposition to merge the three forces looks unlikely to succeed, but cuts in troop numbers by 30,000 to 142,000 over four years are being seriously mooted, as is folding the Royal Marines into the depleted Army, while the Tories are already flirting with the idea of bringing the 25,000 troops based in Germany back to Britain. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have said that they will update Trident and go ahead with two 64,000-tonne aircraft carriers at a cost of 4 billion, but the carriers in particular will still be hotly contested. So too will the 16bn project to buy a new generation of armoured vehicles, as will the pan-European A400M military transporter aircraft, the Typhoon and Joint Strike fighters. All but a couple of dozen of the Army's 345 Challenger Two tanks could be mothballed, as could the AS90 artillery gun and Multiple-Launch Rocket System, a sophisticated weapon that is not useful in a counter-insurgency. The Army, which has borne the brunt of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, has privately lobbied for the aircraft-carriers project to be scrapped on the basis that it is a hangover from the Cold War, but a projection of power has long been a central tenet of the government's defence policy. The Green Paper published almost two months ago as a precursor to the SDR suggested that both Trident and the carriers would go ahead, that the armed forces could play a greater role in combating domestic terrorism, and that ever greater military co-operation with allies such as France and the US would be crucial. The next government will also be constrained by contracts that can't be altered. One area which will receive extra money, says former SAS commander and counter-insurgency expert Clive Fairweather, is Britain's special forces, which have been particularly active in Iraq and Afghanistan and which are recognised worldwide as the best in existence.

4TRIDENT: Both the Liberals and the SNP are opposed to renewing Trident. SNP defence spokesman Angus Robertson (pictured right) calls Trident "the single biggest divergence between the parties", arguing that "to spend 100bn on siting weapons of mass destruction in Scotland is unconscionable". Although both the Tories and Labour, who have halved the number of Britain's nuclear warheads, are committed to its renewal, a policy that remains deeply unpopular with the electorate, there is no evidence so far of the issue affecting voting intentions.

5 THE SCOTLAND DIMENSION: Robertson is in the process of lobbying the MoD and the three main service chiefs ahead of the forthcoming SDR with a view to influencing the allocation of resources. Scotland, says the SNP, has got a raw deal in terms of personnel stationed in Scotland, in terms of procurement and in terms of research and development. The nub of the argument is that 8.4 per cent of the UK population lives in Scotland but that nowhere near the same proportion of resources have been allocated to Scotland. Indeed, Robertson says the shortfall is 4.3bn between 2002 and 2007 alone. The answer, says the SNP, is to run a Scottish Defence Review in tandem with the UK strategic defence review. "Scotland has lost 10,000 defence jobs in the past ten years and if another air base is closed then Scotland, with its proud martial traditions, will be home to less service personnel than the Republic of Ireland. It's about time we got our fair share."

THE FACTS

Since 1997, Labour says spending on defence has increased in real terms by 10 per cent, while 8bn has been spent on operations in Iraq and 9bn on operations in Afghanistan, with another 5bn earmarked for operations against the Taleban in 2010/2011. Current defence spending stands at 36bn a year, which at 3 per cent of GDP is still, according to the Tories, the lowest since the 1930s (it was 4 per cent in 1987). Overstretch is at chronic levels, especially in the Army where 29 of its 36 infantry battalions are under strength and it recently emerged that one third of 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment were not fit to make parachute jumps. The rate of loss of the seasoned NCOs that are the backbone of the Army has been particularly worrying. The attitude of British voters, revealed in a recent study by the Economic and Social Research Council, will have interesting implications for policymakers. The survey found that voters wanted Britain to have a wider role, but don't think the country has the capacity to be the world's policeman. There's a bias towards a multilateral approach – as long as it isn't led by the US. More than 70 per cent of respondents find it acceptable for Britain to take part in UN-led military action; 69 per cent are supportive of us joining a Nato-led force; 31 per cent find unilateral action acceptable and even fewer (28 per cent) could support US-led action; 45 per cent would accept EU-led military action. Unsurprisingly, some 68 per cent believe we have spent too much money supporting the US's military activities, while 74 per cent feel that we have spent too little equipping our armed forces.

HOW THE PARTIES DIVIDE

The Liberals and SNP's opposition to Trident is the single biggest difference in strategy. However, they also have much in common: none of the main parties has ring-fenced defence, and there is little taste for further expensive foreign adventures. Both major parties are committed to a major SDR, and to overhauling a defence-procurement process that has resulted in a series of expensive errors. If there is one major difference between Labour and the Tories, says Ingram, it's the fact the Tories are concentrating on homeland security in the belief that they can deal with threats when they arrive on British soil while Labour are more focused on confronting problems at their source, which is increasingly in sub-Saharan Africa.

HOW IT'LL PLAY OUT

The perception that Tony Blair bounced Labour into Iraq against the wishes of 85 per cent of the population, while the increasingly unpopular Afghan war at least has a moral legitimacy, means polls consistently suggest that Gordon Brown's electoral fortunes have not been unduly damaged by back-to-back conflicts. He has been helped by the fact the economy overshadows all else. Where Brown remains vulnerable is on the question of whether as Chancellor he released sufficient resources to enable the war(s) to be prosecuted successfully. Even then, there is no evidence that the Prime Minister's poll ratings have been affected by strongly worded criticisms of Brown from former defence chiefs, a widespread perception that his decisions as Chancellor led directly to a lack of equipment in general and of helicopters in particular, or even his humiliating public climbdown after wrongly telling Chilcot that defence spending had risen each year under Labour.