"...Talking to journalists on his way to Algiers on Wednesday, David Cameron dropped a heavy hint that the defence budget would be protected from further cuts in this year's mini spending review covering the year 2015-16. The travelling press duly reported his remarks, with some treating them as a promise to increase defence spending above inflation for the rest of the current decade. On arrival in Algiers, Downing Street officials appeared to stand the story up still more firmly, saying that Mr Cameron would honour his earlier pledge to increase defence spending from 2015.
Others stretched the story even further, implying that the promised extra spending would help ensure that Britain could engage against Islamic terrorists in north Africa, as unnamed service chiefs were allegedly urging on Mr Cameron. Commentators inevitably began to speculate on the spending implications for other ministers, suddenly facing fresh departmental budget cuts in order to pay for the PM's apparent largesse towards the Ministry of Defence. Everything appeared to reinforce the narrative that Mr Cameron, the light of battle in his eyes and anxious to offer real commitments to regional regimes, was prepared to cut further at home in order to boost the fight against terrorism in the desert.
There was, however, a problem. The narrative was wrong. UK defence spending in Mali and north Africa is not so great that it requires a rewriting of the defence budget either now or in the foreseeable future. The money is there already. More embarrassingly, Mr Cameron was wrong to hint that current cuts in defence spending would be put into reverse from 2015. That is not his government's policy.
Officials scrambled to get their new story straight. The defence budget would not, after all, be protected from cuts in the 2015-16 review, they announced. Further cuts to the military remained a real possibility. A pre-existing commitment that the defence equipment budget will rise by 1% in real terms from 2016 to 2020 stays...."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/31/defence-spending-no-prime-ministerIgnorance is bliss, bliss is happiness, I am happy...to draw your attention to the possible connectivity in the foregoing.
