国际英语新闻：Britain names new chief of armed forces for radical change

However, the new coalition government has set as its principal task the slashing of the current record public spending deficit of 153 billion pounds (about 240 billion U.S. dollars) by 100 billion pounds (about 150 billion dollars) by 2014.

Against this background, Fox's Ministry of Defense has been ordered to prepare budget cuts of between 10 and 25 percent.

The result is that General Richards, aged 58, is certain to be responsible for implementing the most radical re-shaping of Britain's armed forces in over 50 years.

General Richards is an artillery officer who commanded British troops in Sierra Leone in 2000, when they defended the president in a civil war.

He commanded British and American troops in Afghanistan in 2006, and became the Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the British army, in August 2009.

General Richards is unafraid of speaking out on military issues he considers important.

In January, at the beginning of the consultation process that will result in the SDR, he told an audience at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: "Defense must respond to the new strategic, and indeed economic, environment by ensuring much more ruthlessly that our armed forces are appropriate and relevant to the context in which they will operate rather than the one they might have expected to fight in in previous eras."

"This is not a change that happens once in a generation, it is less frequent than that. And in many ways this one is more fundamental than from horse to tank," he added.

In his speech, he outlined why he thought the war in Afghanistan must be won by NATO.

"Our defeat would act as a match, lighting the fuse that is already finding tinder in Yemen and could so easily set light to parts of Africa, the Middle East and East Asia," he claimed.

General Richards also went public some weeks ago with what he called his "private view" that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan needed to be opened sooner or later in order to find a peace agreement.

"If you look at any counter-insurgency campaign throughout history there's always a point at which you start to negotiate with each other, probably through proxies in the first instance, and I don't know when that will happen," he said in an interview with the BBC.

"This is a purely private view, I think there's no reason why we shouldn't be looking at that sort of thing pretty soon," he added.