Letter: Territorial rights
Only some 1,200 have deployed alongside regulars each year for the past decade, according to TAQ, the TA's own magazine. Many thousands of the TA have not been deployed at all and 10 per cent have declared themselves unavailable for mobilisation for personal reasons.
Similarly, the regular army claims it needs over 100,000 so that it can deploy its contribution to the 9,500 British service personnel in Afghanistan; this is plainly nonsense.
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Hide AdThe TA's role beyond 2015 must be questioned. What will these 28,000 TA soldiers do, other than train and train again? Furthermore, the TA has a huge estate in all the home nations, with over 350 establishments.
Indeed, in the same magazine foreword, the Director (Reserves) admits that the TA could be "distributed and positioned more intelligently".
Ministers will surely wish to know why that has not been done in the past ten years and why successive chiefs of the general staff have allowed this expensive and inefficient state of affairs to continue.
LESTER MAY
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Camden Town, London