The cost of saving the Army

We have led the magazine this week on coming Tory defence cuts, with a brilliant piece by Max Hastings. Look closely at the cover image (our second by Christian Adams) and you can see the guillotine blade will hit he RAF and Navy guys before the Army. This, Hastings argues, will be the effect of the Tory Strategic Defence Review. And even this will leave cuts of up to 20 per cent across the defence budget under the Tories. How could Cameron justify that, in this dangerous world of ours? David Cameron prepares the ground today with an important speech in Chatham House promising “one of the most radical departures in security policy we’ve seen in decades”. He goes on to say that “We need to do much better at stopping wars from ever starting. That means really focussing on the causes of conflicts and then joining all that together to make sure that DfID and the Foreign Office deliver a really tight, tied-up, progressive approach.”