To quote the Telegraph story,
Senior officers were aghast last night at the latest round of cuts. One said: "It is extraordinary that at a time when the Armed Forces are fighting two wars and are stretched to the very limit, defence spending is being pared back in this way."
To be fair, how many of those troops on operations use their parachute ability?
I understand that the 'esprit de corps' of the Parachute Regiment revolves around jumping out of planes for a living but it is very expensive to train and keep people current in this role, which is very under-used. Can the MoD hand on heart say they are providing the very best for 'ordinary' infantry regiments whilst spending a vast amount of money training a different regiment to do something they haven't done on-mass since Suez?
I would rather we in the Armed Forces had more money so that we could afford exuberances such as three battalions of Para-trained infantry plus the many squadrons of personnel from the Corp's also trained but we don't have the luxury of a bottomless budget and with our overseas exploits proving very expensive the realities of providing money for what is actually needed rather than what would be nice to have must be followed. I would prefer that our normal line infantry were better equipped and supported.
Of course there may be an effect on recruitment but the Para's have suffered from quite bad retention/recruitment of late even with parachute training being (reasonably) available so perhaps the problem lies mainly elsewhere.