Some 4,500 British soldiers are told they will be axed in the third and biggest round of army job cuts since the 2010 defense review.
The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) said the 4,480 redundancies are part of the government plans to cut the army by around 20 percent to 82,000 by 2018.
The ministry said the volunteers will be leaving in six months while compulsory redundancies will have to be complete within a year.
Å“It is with great regret that we have had to make redundancies to deliver the reduction in the size of the armed forces, but unfortunately they were unavoidable due to the size of the defence deficit that this government inherited,” Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said.
The cash-strapped MoD announced in its strategic defense review of 2010 that it will cut a total 17,000 posts from the armed forces including 5,000 from the Navy and the Royal Air Force as well as 7,000 from the Army.
Now the ministry says is forced to cut jobs to plug its multi-billion-dollar budget black hole with Hammond promising that there will be no further reductions in manpower during the next round of cuts.
AMR/HE
This article originally appeared on: Press TV