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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now I want to talk more about potential cuts to the Army’s defence capabilities after Sir Peter Wall’s warning last week that they were getting pretty close to the bone in effect. Let’s talk to the former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, a very good morning to you Lord Dannatt. Presumably you go along with what Sir Peter has been saying, that really our ability to operate in future operations is getting jeopardised I suppose?

LORD DANNATT: Well, I think you have got to put what Sir Peter said in the round. He has been in charge of the Army for the last few years now and while it has been asked to go through a very difficult process of reorganisation and he and his senior staff have come up with a very good plan to manage the size of the regular army down from some 102,000 down to 82,000 and that plan is just in the early stages of being put into place. I think what he is genuinely concerned about, and I would share that concern, is if further cuts were going to be imposed before we’d even made this first plan work because that would then be beginning to call into question our capability to do the things that this government or a future government might want us to do.

DM: Well now you’ve mentioned it, let me put to you Syria. We don’t know the scale of any involvements or what it might entail but it is getting closer. Is that the kind of warning the government should heed?

LORD DANNATT: Well if you are talking about Syria specifically, and I heard the last half of your discussion with Lord Reid just now, I am very much from a personal point of view in the camp of those who would not wish to be involved or intervene in any shape or form as far as Syria is concerned. It is a very complex situation and I think there is a real danger of an arm going in a mangle in the way that John Reid was describing, that a small intervention of perhaps just light weapons going to some form of the Syrian opposition – and goodness knows it’s so complex, it’s really hard to know which bit of the opposition to be arming – that that becomes the thin end of the wedge, the arm goes in the mangle and we get ourselves into a much larger intervention. If we have learnt anything in the last few years it is that we don’t get involved in another intervention without having a very clear idea of what we’re going to do, who we’re going to help, what the plan is and what the exist strategy is. Surely we’ve all not forgotten those lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan so quickly.

DM: But that’s the political side of it isn’t it, would the army if ordered to, they carry out orders, have the capabilities in your view for instance to get involved in a training role or something like that, if weapons were given to the rebels?

LORD DANNATT: The army of course would do whatever the elected government of the day said it wanted it to do. There is obviously some discussions about whether any potential operation should be debated in Parliament and I believe that it should be, with something that is actually as controversial as this is but at the end of the day the Army will of course do whatever it is required to do. There is of course the question of its capabilities but given that the Army is going to be reducing and removing, ending its combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of the next year, there is theoretically some capability to do something else but we have got to think very long and hard about whether an operation of any shape or form in Syria makes any sense at all. Personally I don’t believe it does, the route should be a diplomatic route and not an interventionist route.

DM: Okay, Lord Dannatt, thank you very much indeed for your time. Lord Dannatt there, former Head of the Army there.