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Phillip Hammond warns further reductions in spending would erode military capability
Further big cuts in defence spending would lead to the loss of the UK's armed forces capability, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has warned.
Things were "extremely taut" after the biggest cuts since 1991, he said ahead of the chancellor's spending review.
He told the BBC he would be "fighting the corner for my budget and defence".
The Ministry of Defence said while budgets for 2015/2016 onwards had yet to be set, it had been promised a 1% annual increase in equipment spending.
The BBC's Jonathan Beale said that, as Mr Hammond and some other Tory ministers wanted a greater proportion of savings to come from the welfare budget, they were on a collision course with their Lib Dem partners.
'Eroding capability'Reductions in defence spending for 2013-15 in addition to those in 2010's Strategic Defence and Security Review were outlined in last year's Autumn Statement.
But Downing Street said last month that the military would not be immune from further financial cuts in Chancellor George Osborne's spending review later this year.
A report this week from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) suggested this could lead to additional reductions of more than £1bn a year in the defence budget from 2015.
Analysis
It is rare for a senior minister to speak out so publicly about cuts that are still the subject of such tense negotiation.
But Philip Hammond is clearly trying to draw the battle lines ahead of the chancellor's Spending Review for post 2015.
George Osborne has to make savings of at least £10bn.
If that were to translate into cuts right across departments - save for those that have been "ring-fenced" - then the Ministry of Defence could lose more than another £1bn from its budget.
Mr Hammond says while there may be some scope for "modest efficiency savings" he's adamant that he won't be able to make significant cuts without eroding Britain's military capabilities - in other words making more troops redundant and axing more military equipment.
The defence secretary thinks the savings should come from other departments, namely the welfare budget.
That puts him on a collision course with the Conservative's coalition partners. Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, has already publicly stated that he has no plans to make further savings in welfare budget.
Speaking to the BBC as he oversaw a Royal Marines training exercise in Norway, Mr Hammond said: "There may be some modest reductions we can make through further efficiencies and we were look for those, but we won't be able to make significant further cuts without eroding military capability."
He added: "We have some very challenging targets ahead of us to deliver the outcome of the last spending review and I'm clear that we won't be able to deliver big further savings."
He said he understood "the chancellor's challenge to find additional savings in order to consolidate the public finances, as we have to do".
"But we need to look broadly across government at how we are going to do that, not just narrowly at a few departments."
Rusi's Prof Michael Clarke said that, if the chancellor did not "think that the armed forces will be doing as much in the next five to eight years, once Afghanistan is in the rear-view mirror" then he might risk more cuts.
But, since the armed forces had been "continuously in operation since 1991 when the Cold War came to an end", that might be "a bit optimistic", he told BBC One's Breakfast.
Battle linesBBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale said tense negotiations over the next public spending round were already under way and Mr Hammond was publicly drawing the lines of battle.
In a Daily Telegraph interview, Mr Hammond said that a number of Conservative cabinet ministers believed "that we have to look at the welfare budget again... if we are going to get control of public spending on a sustainable basis".
"Start Quote
End Quote Labour MP Paul FlynnThis is just the annual game of horse trading that goes on at every department saying, 'we can't have any cuts here'"
Our correspondent said Mr Hammond's Lib Dem coalition partners believed welfare cuts had gone far enough.
Former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell said that, "if it would not seem flippant, I would say to Philip Hammond 'welcome to the club'".
But he welcome the defence secretary's acknowledgement that, in terms of the military, "our publicly-stated ambitions now significantly exceed our capacity".
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer said Mr Hammond's comments were "a warning shot across Treasury boughs and Lib Dem boughs".
He told BBC Radio 5 live it came at "an extremely febrile time" on the back of the Eastleigh by-election, which the Liberal Democrats won while the Conservatives were pushed into third place.
Labour MP Paul Flynn, meanwhile, told Radio 5 live Mr Hammond had started "the annual game of horse trading that goes on at every department saying, 'we can't have any cuts here'".
"Every department should take these cuts," he said.
Referring to a report by the Public Accounts Committee - which revealed the Ministry of Defence had bought £1.5bn worth of equipment between 2009 and 2011 that it had not used - he said it had been "most outrageously wasteful in spending".
In response to Thursday's report, the government pledged "to reverse decades of lax inventory management".
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