Riding on the Storm: the New British Defense Strategy
... thriftiness came to the forefront and the British elite decided to sacrifice defense spending. London planned to bring its forward deployable contingent to 30,000, whereas at the beginning of the Iraq war , it had been 50 percent larger. Reductions in the army after the withdrawal from Iraq in 2009 were of course reasonable but the cuts in hardware, primarily in the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, have produced long-term negative effects on the nation's defense capabilities, increasing the need to rectify the situation with the new strategy. Among other things, in 2010, the British decided to ditch all Harrier II VTOL ...