OldFatOne asked:
I doubt we will learn too much more until the Public Spending Review (November??) and the Defence Review (no idea when)
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Dates:
- Spending review was announced in the Budget as Wed 20 Oct 10.
- Rumour has it that SDSR should be published late Nov early Dec, but it may be a little earlier.
but it seems to me that defence will be lucky to escape with anything less than a 10 per cent cut in real terms - and that is a big number.
Quite right. A 10% cut over four years would be surprisingly good news (despite how awful that sounds) as if you cut defence and schools by 10%, then every Department other than NHS and DfID will get cut by 33%. And that's officially painful. (See the Institute of Fiscal Studies
The Institute For Fiscal Studies - Emergency Budget June 2010 - Rowena Crawford's presentation)
You're not going to achieve anything like that by simply reducing the size of the MOD - the cuts (savings) will have to be found throughout the Defence budget.
Yes, absolutely right. Let's call them cuts; they are. There
WILL be fewer Sqns, Stations and whatnot at the end of this. Some sacred cows will get the bullet, and there's going to be a lot of blood on the floor. Running at least ankle deep, in fact.
If anybody has the figures handy, it would be interesting to see how much was saved by Options for Change back in 1991. If my memory serves my correctly (increasingly unlikely) those cuts (targeted at post Cold War force reduction) reduced the armed forces by about a third, but I'm not sure what the commensurate budget reduction in percentage terms was??
I don't have the figures immediately to hand, OFO, but IIRC Options for Change was about -7% and Front Line First was another -4%. So our
BEST CASE scenario is "Options for Saving Money" and "Front Line Last" being conducted concurrently.
Does that sort of put in in perspective? And remember, 25% cuts would more than
twice as tough as "Options for Saving Money" and "Front Line Last"
combined. At the same time.
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