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precede firm decisions to reduce our deployment and commitments, could begin and decisions be taken thereafter by July. Our room for manoeuvre
was in fact limited to our Far East deployments and commitments and to the
consequential effects of these on the forces, facilities and stocks which we needed to maintain for them in the United Kingdom. The main reasons why the defence studies were not offering savings as readily as the defence review had done were that it was no longer as it had been in the earlier defence Review- a matter of cutting out wasteful expenditure and getting better value for money on equipment without reducing our capabilities; nor could we now look for the saving of £50 million annually which we had
hoped for by withdrawing troops from Germany. This had been based on the assumption that units withdrawn from Germany could be disbanded but in
fact it had proved necessary for them to remain assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: this saving had now been reduced to £5 million annually. Similarly the study that had been made of the savings
that would accrue from reducing our forces in the Far East by half showed
much smaller savings than we had hoped because our commitments required us to be able to return these forces to the Far East in emergency, to maintain stockpiles of equipment for them and manpower to guard these in the Far
East, and military and logistic backing in the United Kingdom.
In these circumstances he had discussed with the Foreign Secretary a
more drastic reduction in our commitments in the Far East which appeared
to offer the possibility of making savings as a result of the defence
studies as a whole of £150-200 million in 1970-71 and up to £300 million
in 1975-76. It would involve withdrawing our forces wholly from Singapore and Malaysia by 1975-76 and maintaining only a minimum military presence (consisting of naval and air forces) in the Far East based on Australia.
This would mean reducing by half the level of locally employed staff in Singapore/Malaysia by 1970-71. It would also involve renegotiating our
commitments and particularly our force declarations to the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and our treaty commitments to Malaysia, so
that we no longer undertook to provide any land forces. It would also mean
that we could no longer contribute to the Commonwealth Brigade. We could
however contribute amphibious forces, together with air and naval support
to a Commonwealth strategic force.
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