The UK will no longer be a world power once cuts to the armed forces are completed, a senior military analyst has claimed.
Cuts to the armed forces began in earnest on Thursday as over 1800 army and RAF personnel were made redundant.
They are the first of 12,000 job losses expected in the RAF and Army over the next four years. The Ministry of Defence is to shed 22,000 posts in total.
Writing exclusively in Friday’s Courier, former SAS deputy commander Major Clive Fairweather says cuts to the military will make it impossible for the UK to engage in any lengthy armed conflict in the future.
Major Fairweather, a former chief inspector of prisons, also warns the swingeing cuts will make it harder, if not impossible, for the UK to defend interests overseas.
He writes: “Maybe we have been punching way above our weight for decades, so time to draw our horns in and concentrate on jobs to feed our bairns.
“Let’s hope we are not tested over the Falklands (with their potential undersea oil riches) because this time round there’s nothing can be done.
“Let’s hope the so-called Arab spring remains that way and doesn’t become an autumn or winter.”
The MoD told 920 soldiers and 930 RAF personnel they are being made redundant. In the army this includes 260 compulsory redundancies, nearly 150 of which were Gurkhas.
A total of 869 soldiers applied for voluntary redundancy but only 660 are being allowed to leave.
Four hundred and ninety RAF personnel are being made compulsorily redundant. An additional 440 personnel had applications for voluntary redundancies accepted.
The Army has 100,000 personnel and the RAF 40,000. The Royal Navy will notify its first tranche of redundancy selections on September 30.
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Each branch of the service will then have up to three more rounds of redundancy notices.
Military personnel serving in Afghanistan or supporting operations in Libya are exempt from the cuts.
Troops about to deploy to Afghanistan, or who have recently returned from duty there, are also protected from losing their jobs.
A spokeswoman for the MoD said rank and role rather than location or unit was determining where the axe falls.
Defence secretary Liam Fox said the job losses are unavoidable.
He said: “The responsibility for these redundancies lies with the incompetence of the last Labour government who left the nation’s finances broken and a £38 billion black hole in the defence budget.
“The tough measures we have taken will bring the budget largely into balance for the first time in a generation. The extra money we have allocated for the equipment budget from 2015 will allow our defence capability to grow in the second half of the decade.”
North East Fife MP Sir Menzies Campbell, a member of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “It’s all very well to reduce numbers in the armed forces but if we don’t reduce our ambitions, military overstretch is inevitable.
“It’s just as well that we are out of Iraq, Libya is approaching a military conclusion, and that we have a fixed date for withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan. Otherwise we could be seriously embarrassed.”
Labour leader Ed Miliband said: “I don’t think they (the Government) have a coherent plan, and I think people will feel that actually some of what is happening today is evidence that they haven’t got that coherent plan.”