Leaked comments by the head of the Army that were highly critical of the way that soldiers have been treated caused further embarrassment for the Ministry of Defence yesterday.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, said that the military covenant under which the men and women of the Armed Forces were supposed to be given decent homes, medical facilities and welfare benefits in return for risking their lives for their country “is clearly out of kilter”.

He also described soldiers as feeling “devalued, angry and suffering from Iraq fatigue”. General Dannatt made his comments in a foreword to a survey he had commissioned that gave army personnel and their families the chance to give their views on every issue from accommodation to pay.

The leaking of the report with his foreword to The Sunday Telegraph forced General Dannatt and the MoD to make damage-limitation statements. General Dannatt said: “The military covenant is not [this word is underlined by the MoD] broken, but more needs to be done.”

The MoD said that the report, called Chief of the General Staff’s Briefing Team Report, had been drawn up in June. “Many improvements have taken place since then,” a spokesman said. The official highlighted the 9.4 per cent pay rise given to the most junior soldiers, the £5 billion allocated to providing better accommodation over the next ten years, and a 12 per cent improvement in recruiting.

However, the leaked comments by General Dannatt, who has already aired his Service’s grievances on a number of occasions in public, were seized on by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, said: “The only conclusion anyone can come to now is that the Army is too small and under-resourced for the tasks it is being asked to carry out. The utter disjunction between Labour’s foreign and defence policies is now laid bare for all to see.”

Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrats’ defence spokesman, said the survey of views in the Army and General Dannatt’s personal comments showed “just how bad things have become”.

“It is over a year since General Dannatt spoke out [in a newspaper interview] to say the Government was in danger of breaking the covenant,” Mr Harvey said.

Last week Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal, who commanded the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment during a particularly tough deployment to Afghanistan last year, announced that he was resigning his commission and criticised the shoddy treatment of injured troops, appalling housing and a lack of training equipment.

In his foreword to the leaked report, General Dannatt said that the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were putting soldiers and their families under “great pressure”, and that the long-term impact was “mortgaging the goodwill of our people”.

The report itself, based on the views of thousands of soldiers canvassed by General Dannatt’s team, said that the present level of operations was unsustainable, and that the Army was undermanned, with an increasing number of troops disillusioned with service life.

It also revealed that the MoD was sending medically downgraded troops to guard the Falklands garrison in order to release fitter soldiers for Iraq and Afghanistan.

A written Commons answer published last week showed that the majority of army infantry battalions were suffering from manpower gaps.

General Dannatt wrote in the foreword: “We must strive to give individuals and units ample time between operations but I do not underestimate how difficult this will be to achieve whilst undermanned and with less robust establishments [the required manpower levels] than I would like.”

The MoD said that a recent “attitude survey” carried out across the Armed Forces had revealed that 92 per cent of army officers and 79 per cent of other ranks felt proud to be in the Army.

The MoD said that the army briefing team had canvassed the opinions of all ranks, and its report contained the “unedited views of individual soldiers, some of which represented more widespread opinion, and others are isolated views”.

The ministry insisted that the report also contained “many positives”, including favourable comments about new equipment that had been sent out to Iraq and Afghanistan, such as the Mastiff and Bulldog armoured vehicles.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, claimed that those who said that the military covenant was broken were wrong.

Next spring the MoD is to publish a White Paper on service personnel that will take stock of policies affecting the Armed Forces and set out plans to improve conditions. A parallel study will also be conducted into encouraging greater public engagement in supporting the Armed Forces.

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