Rush to war 'caused shortages for armed forces'

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup told the Iraq inquiry sitting in London that defence chiefs "simply didn't have enough time" to source everything they wanted before the March 2003 invasion.

He said it would have made a "significant difference" if the military had been given the full six months considered necessary to prepare for a large deployment.

In the event they had just four months.

Sir Jock, who was deputy chief of defence staff (equipment) at the time of the invasion, singled out problems with supplying enough body armour, desert combats and boots for front-line troops.

He said: "The problem of course was that we simply didn't have enough time, as it turned out, to do everything we needed to do before the operation started."

Asked whether having an extra two months to prepare for the war would have helped, he said: "I think it would have made a significant difference. That's 50 per cent additional time."

He also admitted military chiefs were "very nervous" about overstretching British forces when the government decided to deploy extra troops to southern Afghanistan in January 2006.

"There was absolutely this concern about the overlap between Iraq and Afghanistan and the doubt whether we would actually be able to reduce in Iraq quite as quickly as we were planning at that time," he said.

He added: "We would have preferred to see some substantive draw-down movement in our deployment in Iraq before going into Afghanistan."