Brirish lives were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan because Gordon Brown denied the Armed Forces vital equipment, two former military chiefs have claimed.
The Prime Minister will today face questions over damaging claims that he 'betrayed' UK troops by chopping £1billion from the defence budget at the height of the Iraq war.
Speaking on the eve of the Premier's appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, Sir Graeme Lamb, former head of the SAS, and General Lord Guthrie, a former chief of the defence staff, both spoke out on Mr Brown's record as Chancellor.
Sir Graeme, who advises General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, said British troops were deprived of equipment that could have saved lives.
He blamed senior politicians and civil servants for undermining our military strength.
He warned the Armed Forces were 'pretty much doomed on our current course and thinking' and would become the 'dumpster of irrelevancy' unless given proper equipment.
'The future is bloody grim either way,' he said, adding that the Armed Forces were clearly in decline and increasingly seen as irrelevant by the public and politicians.
Sir Graeme told the Daily Telegraph that until recently Afghanistan had been ' stumbling toward failure'.
General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, who led the Armed Forces from 1997 to 2001, told the Times that budget shortages had cost lives. 'Not fully funding the Army in the way they had asked ... undoubtedly cost the lives of soldiers,' he said.
'He [Mr Brown] should be asked why he was so unsympathetic towards defence and so sympathetic to other departments.'
The Prime Minister will give his first account of his role in the deeply unpopular Iraq conflict today.
Some of his Cabinet colleagues expect him to offer some gesture of contrition over deaths of servicemen and women.
Others are furious that the Prime Minister agreed to face the inquiry at all in the weeks before the election, fearing it is reminding wavering voters of Labour's most controversial decision.
The Prime Minister is expected to be pressed on private discussions with Cabinet colleagues in the build-up to the conflict, his decisions on funding as Chancellor and his withdrawal of troops as Prime Minister.
The Tories and the LibDems said it was right that Mr Brown is being called to account before the election.
He pointed to evidence from Sir Kevin Tebbit, the former top civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, that he had been forced to run a 'crisis budget' after Mr implemented a 'complete guillotine' on funding in September
The then Chancellor was also present at meetings with MoD officials when the budget for 2004 was 2003. reached.
Mr Clegg said minutes and notes relevant to these decisions should be declassified by the Government and made public before Mr Brown's appearance.
He added: 'Today is the day that Gordon Brown wished would never come: The myth that this was solely Tony Blair's war is about to fall apart.'
Last year, the Government took the unprecedented step of vetoing the release of Cabinet minutes under freedom of information laws that were expected to reveal Mr Brown's private support for military action.
Alastair Campbell, the former No 10 communications director, has told the inquiry that Mr Brown was one of the inner circle of key ministers consulted by Mr Blair in the run-up to the invasion.
HELICOPTER NUMBERS CUT BY HALF
The number of helicopters available to British troops will have halved by the end of the decade, it was revealed last night.
Ministry of Defence figures show there will be 303 in the fleet by 2020, compared with 634 a month before the Iraq War began in March 2003.
Military commanders have warned that a shortage of 'rotary-wing' aircraft can mean that service personnel are forced to move around the battlefield by road - leaving them vulnerable to bombs.
Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, a member of the Defence Select Committee, has uncovered Parliamentary answers which show the Government plans to cut the fleet drastically over the next ten years.
In February 2003 the MoD had 634 helicopters, but by July 2008 this has been reduced to 522 helicopters.
Despite claims by Gordon Brown that military chiefs had enough helicopters, and the announcement in December that Britain was buying another 22 troop-carrying Chinooks, this month the number of choppers stood at 492.
And the fleet will total just 303 by the end of the decade, according to official figures.
Mr Jenkin said: 'Helicopters are vital in the effort to improve battlefield mobility and reduce casualties and we need more not less of them, but Gordon Brown still doesn't seem to understand this.
'This goes back to his 2004 decision to cut the helicopter budget by £1.4billion at a time when we were already involved in two wars.'
The MoD said: 'While overall numbers have reduced, the capability of our helicopter fleet has in fact increased. Better aircraft have allowed increases in both the numbers of battlefield support helicopters available on operations and the flying hours they can provide.'
'Penny-pinching': Gordon Brown on a visit to Iraq in December 2008
Sacrifice: Private Adam Morris, 19, was killed in Basra in 2006 when his Snatch Land Rover struck a roadside bomb
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