**Two former heads of the armed forces have strongly challenged Gordon Brown’s evidence to the Iraq war inquiry.**The prime minister, who was chancellor when the war began, said the military had been given everything it asked for.
But Lord Guthrie, ex-chief of the defence staff, said in the Daily Telegraph that armed forces had been denied a request for more helicopters.
His successor, Lord Boyce, told the Times Mr Brown had been “disingenuous”, but No 10 rejected the criticisms.
Downing Street insisted that Mr Brown could not have been clearer in his response to questions about military funding.
It also repeated his statement that no request for equipment had ever been turned down.
Lord Guthrie, who held his post from 1997 to 2001, said the Ministry of Defence “received the bare minimum from the chancellor, who wanted to give the military as little as he could get away with”.
“At any point, commanders were able to ask for equipment that they needed”
Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Full story: Brown grilled](http://www.paklinks.com/2/low/uk_news/politics/8551049.stm)
He said: "The whole defence budget was extremely difficult to run in his time.
"For Gordon Brown to say he has given the military all they asked for is not true.
“They asked for more helicopters but they were told they could not have any more.”
Lord Guthrie added: “He cannot get away with saying ‘I gave them everything they asked for’. That is simply disingenuous.”
Lord Boyce, who was chief of the Defence Staff up to the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, said: “He’s dissembling, he’s being disingenuous. It’s just not the case that the Ministry of Defence was given everything it needed”.
“There may have been a 1.5 per cent increase in the defence budget but the MoD was starved of funds.”
Sacrifices acknowledged
The prime minister said he fully backed the 2003 war and had been kept “in the loop” by Tony Blair in the build-up.
The Lib Dems say inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot should publish Treasury documents to clear up the row.
The prime minister was questioned for four hours about his role in the run-up to the war and its aftermath, making clear throughout that he thought the conflict had been “right” to prevent other “rogue states” flouting international law but that lessons could be learned from it.
He paid tribute to the “sacrifices” of British servicemen and women, saying: “Obviously the loss of life is something that makes us all sad.”
‘Manageable’ costs
He insisted UK forces had been given all the equipment they had asked for, telling the panel: “At any point, commanders were able to ask for equipment that they needed and I know of no occasion when they were turned down.”
He said the Iraq war had cost Britain £8bn and the total cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been £18bn, on top of what he repeatedly stressed was an increasing defence budget.
He admitted it was a sizeable sum of money which had “made my life more difficult” as chancellor.
“The truth of the Iraq invasion may have been forever lost to the New Labour spin machine”
Angus Robertson, SNP
Iraq inquiry: Day-by-day timeline](http://www.paklinks.com/2/low/uk_news/politics/8378559.stm)
Iraq war was ‘right’, says Brown](http://www.paklinks.com/2/low/uk_news/politics/8550779.stm)
But he said the government had been able to meet the costs from reserves without making cuts elsewhere and it had ultimately been “manageable”.
He also strongly defended his decision to curb defence spending following the invasion in 2003.
In 2002, the Ministry of Defence had used new Whitehall accounting rules to claim it had achieved efficiency savings of £1.3bn it had intended to spend on new equipment.
However, Mr Brown said there was no proof that the savings had been achieved and that if other Whitehall departments had followed their example it could have destabilised the public finances.
Former MoD permanent secretary Sir Kevin Tebbit previously told the inquiry that, after Mr Brown instituted his “guillotine”, he had been forced to run the department on a “crisis budget”.
But Mr Brown insisted the MoD had still been left with more money than it had been allocated in the 2002 government spending review.