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The Defence Minister Lord Drayson has just spent a very painful day in the House of Lords, listening to a succession of massively senior retired generals and admirals kicking the living daylights out of the government's handling of over the last few years.

The assault culminated in a withering denunciation by the former First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Boyce. He accused the government of dodging unpleasant choices about big equipment programmes, resulting in a spending squeeze which was now affecting front line operations.

Cut its cloth?

"Today we have a defence train crash, long predicted and exacerbated by ministers' reluctance to take hard programme decisions, which all simply adds more negative to the bottom line.

"It's too much to hope that the present government will provide the necessary cash to allow its aspirations to be realised properly or honourable. It's too much to hope alternatively that it will cut its cloth, not least by not evading issues, such as commissioning a rather than gripping the problem now," he said.

"The government can take little satisfaction in the way they have handled defence over the last decade, and where there has been a demonstrable lack of commitment, so evident, and which has brought defence to the parlous state it is in today.

"From one end of the spectrum where cadet forces have been denied training because of contraction of funding, to the TA having their pre-deployment training cut by half, even after the so-called reinstatement of the TA budget last week...through the incoherence of the equipment programme, where the endless re-profiling to conceal the bankruptcy of the department, and to avoid taking unpalatable decisions because of potential political fallout is adding cost upon cost..."

And there were several more bitterly critical speeches from others with military credentials.

Lord Drayson - who enjoys a formidable reputation as an administrator and is a much improved parliamentarian - displayed no visible contusions, and he fought the government's corner. But few ministers have faced such a corrosive, footnoted onslaught. He promised to study everything said in the debate.

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