The Armed Forces helicopter fleet is to be reduced by more than half over the next ten years to save £1.4 billion from the defence budget, The Times has learnt.

Under the Ministry of Defence’s plans for the future the total fleet will be reduced to 291 by 2019. This will involve the Fleet Air Arm reducing from 166 to 66 helicopters, the Army Air Corps from 198 to 112, and the RAF from 138 to 113.

The revelation came after the country’s most senior military officer emerged from talks with Gordon Brown to say that the deployment of more helicopters to Afghanistan would save lives.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff, gave the Prime Minister a “shopping list” of equipment and troop demands for Afghanistan from Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the Army.

The involvement of Sir Jock and the decision to go direct to No 10 highlighted the drama of a week in which General Dannatt has grabbed the headlines by making public his concerns about the campaign in Afghanistan during a visit to the troops in Helmand province.

Speaking in Downing Street after requesting more helicopters, additional troops and extra spy-in-the-sky unmanned surveillance drones, Sir Jock said: “In this situation where you have lots of improvised explosive devices, the more you can increase your tactical flexibility by moving people by helicopters, then the more unpredictable your movements become to the enemy. Therefore it is quite patently the case that you could save casualties by doing that.”

With two of the most senior military chiefs making public statements about the requirement for more helicopters and other equipment for the troops in Helmand, the Prime Minister was left in no doubt that the three services are now allied in demanding more resources for the campaign.

Downing Street said General Dannatt’s recommendations would be looked at “very seriously”.

Asked on the Radio 4 Today programme whether the Army had now become more political, General Dannatt replied: “Military business is always through a political framework. Whether it’s political with a big ‘P’ or a little ‘P’, it’s naive to think that soldiers can just do rifles and boots and whatever, we have to sit within a savvy, wider envelope.”

“Yes, of course, there is a line which generals speaking publicly should not cross. If some people think I crossed it that’s their judgment and I respect their judgment, but I don’t believe I crossed it,” he added.

General Dannatt said that he had warned the MoD that he would be bringing back a shopping list of demands from his Afghanistan trip, and that there would be a “financial cost” involved. The “strategic enterprise” in Afghanistan would be at risk, he said, if the troops did not have the surveillance equipment they needed to try to catch the Taleban planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs). “If we fail in our offensive counter-IED campaign it’ll have strategic consequences because, quite rightly, if we were to carry on the number of casualties that we had last week the people of our own country might say, ‘hang on, I think this is a price not worth paying’ — but that would be a disaster in strategic terms,” General Dannatt said.

“We have got to be able to see what the Taleban are doing better [with] overhead surveillance — we have a certain amount of capability — we’ve got to be able to target where they’re laying these things. We’ve also got to have sufficient people on the ground to build up our human intelligence picture so that we know what’s going on with the Taleban laying their IEDs so we can kill or capture people who are doing this to deter them from doing it again, or just simply to remove them. It’s really critical we do that,” he said.

General Dannatt, who retires on August 28, said that if more money was not going to be forthcoming from the Treasury, the MoD would have to “reorder some of our internal priorities”. He admitted that this would not be welcomed in the MoD because more money would have to go to the Army, to the detriment of the Royal Navy and RAF.

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