Patrick Mercer: As the axe hangs over our forces, we must be realistic and utterly ruthless

Given the difficulties involved in making sharp and rapid reductions in procurement spending, the personnel budget will have to bear a significant share of this cut. Some figures that are being bandied about are a 15 per cent cut in total MoD personnel numbers, including 30,000 military personnel and 13,000 MoD employed civilians.

Now, it doesn't need to be underlined that more than 300 servicemen and women have been killed on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border since our engagement began there in 2002. The difficult question is, how do we adjust our Armed Forces to deal not just with this particularly bloody situation but also to prepare ourselves for any eventualities that might lie ahead?

Broadly, there are two courses of action. First, try to keep a balanced series of forces backed up by a nuclear deterrent that can deal with the sort of threats that we have faced before, that is, a new Cold War. Or, throw all of our resources into forces geared for a series of counter-insurgency campaigns such as the one that we are facing at the moment. Sadly, neither can be right and the trick is to balance the

two.

I left the Army in 1999. If I had suggested to my brother officers that the next battle honour that we stitched upon the Regimental Colours would be the word Afghanistan then I would have been laughed to scorn. But it has happened and who, therefore, can say that we will not need the sort of heavy equipment in terms of ships, aircraft and tanks that we will need to fight a conventional enemy a long way from home? But, I believe that the equation boils down to doing those things at which our forces are good and providing them with the appropriate equipment.

First, I think it most unlikely that we will ever face a single enemy again by ourselves. So, I doubt that we will ever fight another Falklands War and I believe that we can depend upon always operating as part of a coalition.

If that premise is correct, we have got to ask how we can best support that. I think that the answer is fairly simple – with our outstanding manpower that is respected by the rest of the world. Certainly, we have had our difficulties with equipment and other resources and I know how bemused our American cousins are by our apparent willingness to hamstring our troops with poor kit. But I have never heard a word of criticism for our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. In

Afghanistan, the gallantry and resilience of our ground forces are a by-word amongst the Allies; our aircrew – both RAF and Naval – are hugely admired and our Special Forces are considered to be simply the best.

So, it boils down to our manpower versus kit. The purchasing of new equipment fleets is vastly expensive and is destined never to be quite right. But we cannot, surely, be wrong if we swell the numbers of fighting troops who are sufficiently well-trained to take their place upon any battlefield. UK recruiting is exceptionally good but the training pipeline has been so tightly stretched by the last government that there aren't the places available to top up with the numbers that are so desperately required.

Look at the infantry training centre at Catterick; it has a queue a mile long of young men wishing to join the regiments who are taking the brunt of the fighting in Afghanistan. And that must be one of the new Government's most urgent priorities, to get the manpower equation right.

On top of this, there are savings that can be made. For instance, never again must over 300m be spent refurbishing the offices of the Ministry of Defence when we are in the middle of a shooting war. Similarly, why are there now more civil servants in the MoD than there are soldiers in the Army?

Difficult times lie ahead for the MoD. Clear thinking is required and an utter ruthlessness about matching commitments to capabilities – we must never again mix up ambition with ability because that is what

costs lives.

Patrick Mercer is MP for Newark and a former soldier. He was chairman of the Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee in the House of Commons between 2008 and 2010.