British military cuts 1,000 navy jobs

The British military made more than 1,000 sailors redundant as part of the country's wider efforts to balance its military budget against a background of economic stagnation and sharp cutbacks in government spending, local media reported on Friday. They are the first part of cuts that will see 5,000 jobs lost from the Royal Navy by 2015, as Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition government, which came to power in 2010, struggles to keep its budgets under control. A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense (MOD) said the cuts were "the next step after last year's announcement of the Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR). It was announced then that there would be 5,000 redundancies in the Royal Navy, 7,000 in the army, and 5,000 within the Royal Air Force." In addition, the MOD will also cut 32,000 civilian jobs, as part of a plan to save 5 billion pounds (about 7.8 billion U.S. dollars). A total of 1,020 jobs were cut on Friday, 350 of them compulsory redundancies. Defense Secretary Liam Fox said in an interview with the Guardian daily newspaper Friday that the military was partly to blame for the cuts because of its bad management of projects. Fox said that the MOD and former military leaders had to accept responsibility for a "complete breakdown of trust" between the military and the British government. He said that before the coalition government came to power in 2010, there had been "an almost complete breakdown between the MOD and the Treasury and the MOD and Number 10 (Downing Street)." The secretary added that just after taking office he did not trust his own department, "I was never convinced in early months that the department actually knew what the cost of things were." The reduction in the British military spending has been seen by some as a signal of Britain's declining status as a global power and the relative weakening of its economy in the wake of the global financial crisis. The cuts are part of a wider plan to reduce military spending by up to 8 percent over the coming four years. So far the plan already included the scrapping of the navy's flagship, the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, along with the entire fixed-wing aircraft fleet that flew off it, leaving Britain with no aircraft carrier and no naval aircraft for the coming 10 years. Lee Willett, head of the maritime studies program at the London thinktank Royal United Services Institute, said in a TV interview Friday that the British navy was not big enough for all the tasks around the world, and ships had to be taken from counter-piracy tasks and from home waters for the Libyan mission. Budget problems have had significant effects on British military capability. The latest ships for the navy, the Type 45 destroyers in the HMS Daring class, have suffered from budget overspend. There were originally intended to be 12 vessels in the Type 45 class, but only six have been built or are nearing completion for the original budget price.