By Adrian Croft
LONDON (Reuters) - The Conservatives said on Monday they aimed to keep Britain in the front rank of military powers despite a budget squeeze and would seek to boost defence exports if they win an election due by June.
Both the Conservatives and the Labour Party have promised a strategic review of defence policy soon after the election, which the Conservatives are favourites to win.
Whichever party wins will face pressure to cut a public deficit forecast to reach 178 billion pounds this year. Defence is a prime candidate for cuts.
The armed forces have been stretched by long deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and face doubts about how they will pay for a range of multi-billion-dollar armament projects, such as new aircraft carriers and nuclear-armed submarines.
Conservative defence spokesman Liam Fox said the next government would find a military that was "overstretched, undermanned and in possession of worn out equipment."
Accusing Prime Minister Gordon Brown of under-funding the armed forces, Fox said: "The consequence of Gordon Brown's actions has been a 12-year increasing imbalance between resources and requirements..."
The government, in power for 13 years, maintains that the defence budget has grown by more than 10 percent in real terms since 1998.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, a London defence thinktank, Fox said the Conservatives would carry out the defence review "ruthlessly and without sentiment."
AMBITIOUS GOALS
But he set out ambitious goals, saying Britain must be able to defend its 14 overseas territories, including the disputed Falkland Islands (known as Las Malvinas in Spanish), over which Britain and Argentina fought a war in 1982.
"We need to decide if we want to stay in the first division or slide into the second division. I choose the former," he said.
He said the Conservatives backed government plans to renew the country's fleet of nuclear-armed submarines at a cost of around 20 billion pounds.
Fox said Britain must keep its ability to act unilaterally if necessary, taking issue with the assumptions of a government discussion paper last week which said British armed forces would increasingly have to act in partnership with allies.
Conservative defence procurement policy would aim to safeguard British defence jobs by maximising exports, Fox said.
"The Conservative Party will use defence exports as a foreign policy tool and we will seek to increase Britain's share of the world defence market," he said.
Britain exported 4.2 billion pounds of defence equipment in 2008, giving it a 17 percent share of the world defence export market, according to government figures released last June.
The Labour government pledged to clean up Britain's weapons export trade in 1998 after a damning report into the sale of arms to Iraq in the 1980s.
(Editing by Angus MacSwan)
(c) Reuters 2012. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.
