"The Secretary of State for Defence has pushed publicly for £11bn of additional funding to meet Defences needs and has been granted £5bn in the short term and a planned small rise in the budget over the next couple of years. In other words the UK is not cutting the defence budget, but it will have to cut the size, shape and ambition of the armed forces.
Why is this necessary? Simply put the declining value of the pound due to foreign currency fluctuations and stubbornly high inflation, coupled with significant cost increases on projects (for example the Type 31 project) means that everything is getting more expensive than planned. This is coupled with projects taking longer to complete or going over budget as problems are identified and resolved as well as the rise in energy bills and basic infrastructure costs means the MOD funding is not sufficient to meet all the demands placed on it."
"The armed forces are very bad at taking genuinely bold cuts to free up resources – instead they cling on to things like a drowning man clings to ever smaller bits of wreckage, without asking whether it is doing any good. "