Armed forces: Conflict zone

The manpower planners of the UK’s armed forces have, in effect, been working in the dark for most of 2010. Last week’s strategic defence and security review (SDSR) shed the first shafts of light on what is to come. With troop numbers to fall by 17,000 by 2015, it signals one of the biggest headcount reductions since the end of the cold war in the early 1990s.