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Page 202 The Committee then considered, paragraph by paragraph, the summary of the report of the Defence Review Working Party on pages 31-35 of OPD(67) 46.
The following main points were made
Paragraph (4)
It would more correctly state the view of Ministers if this paragraph,
which dealt with the time by which we could expect to have disengaged from
formal major commitments and military position outside Europe were to refer
to 1975-76 rather than to the second half of the 1970s.
Paragraph 8
In view of the difficulties which faced us in achieving larger savings
more rapidly than was proposed in our defence expenditure in the Far East,
the best hope for increased savings lay in further force withdrawals from
Germany and in the disbandment of some of these forces; but we were not free to do this in the absence of reciprocal East/West force reductions and it
was important to the preservation of our position in NATO and Europe,
particularly in relation to German forces, that troops redeployed to this
country should neither be disbanded nor removed from the control of the
Commander-in-Chief, Northern Army Group. Units selected for disbandment
must come from the forces as a whole and not those withdrawn from any
particular area. We should not announce, in the forthcoming Defence White
Paper, any specific plans for withdrawing further forces from Germany or state our intended strengths there.
Paragraph (9)
Our commitments to the CENTO and to Iran were necessary on economic and
political grounds in view of the importance to us of Iranian oil supplies
and of the risk that Iran might fall completely within the Soviet orbit.
Forces to meet these commitments were being progressively reduced but it
was not possible to foresee now what support it would be necessary to
provide after 1970. We also had an important interest in retaining the
use of the northern route for aircraft. The position would be more
accurately expressed if this paragraph of the summary and paragraph 30 of the report itself indicated that, by the mid-1970s we might still require to maintain a general commitment to assist Iran.
Paragraph 10
Staging facilities were required in Cyprus for aircraft going to the
Middle and Far East and to the eastern side of Africa. Although these
facilities might, in certain circunstances, not be available to us in
emergency, this would not necessarily be so. As regards our commitment to
Libya, which was dealt with in paragraph 31 of the main report, the Libyan Government were not pressing us to remove our forces quickly. If they did so we should consider dropping the Treaty commitment to Libya and, in any
event, we should view this commitment as one which might disappear before 1973
if circumstances were to arise in which this was convenient to ourselves and
to the Libyan Government.
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