Megaphone conversation goes on, this time from Iraq

I wrote here about what I thought was the bizarre megaphone conversation between Tony Blair and our troops in Afghanistan here. He said they could have what ever they wanted, through the press and the answer came back through the press.

We now have the commander of British forces in Southern Iraq, Major General Richard Shirreff, adding his tuppence worth here.

It appears he feels the armed forces are under resourced. He puts it down to a generation of under funding and to be fair blames both this and past governments.

This all started with the peace dividend. This was the stupid idea that the end of the cold war would lead to a fluffy cuddly world where we did not need quite the military we had before. Of course the cold war was swiftly followed by the first Gulf war, chaos in Somalia and Afghanistan, the Balkan wars and lots of other conflicts.

You would have hoped that at some point in this obvious lack of peace politicians would have stopped taking the peace dividend and realised it was a folly from start to finish, but the fact is that our troops are now engaged in more places at one time than they have been since the Second World war. We just do not have the troop numbers and I don't care what the MOD say, the equipment to do the job at hand.

Not only do we need to look at defence spending again, but it is also clear that we need to un merge some regiments and rebuild our army.