This is a transcript of the 'essay' by an anonymous serving officer which was read by an actor on The World This Weekend on Sunday 10 Oct 2010:

An article by the BAFF Chairman appears in the Defence section of the Sep-Oct 2010 edition of Government Gazette magazine, which was available at the recent party conferences. The full article can be downloaded below.

BBC News Defence Correspondent Caroline Wyatt says that amphibious forces have played a major role in British military operations for centuries. Now there are fears the Royal Navy could lose much of that capability, as the National Security Council meets to review the country's defence strategy.

Wyatt visited assault ship HMS Albion returning from an exercise in Scotland with young Royal Marine commandos aboard. She also interviewed the Commandant General of the Royal Marines and Commander Amphibious Forces, Maj Gen Buster Howes, as 40 Commando RM returned to the UK from Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Thousands of troops should be forced into the reserves and hundreds of weapons mothballed for Britain to make defence savings, according to a think tank study by a professor of defence engineering. The Daily Telegraph reports that:

The House of Commons Library has produced a useful note on recent developments affecting inquests and fatal accident inquiries (Scotland) into the deaths of service personnel.

The Goverment has announced that families of servicemen and women killed on active duty will benefit from publicly-funded higher education scholarships.The new scheme will apply to the children of servicemen and women killed on active military service since 1990, giving them the chance to take up university scholarships. The Government also announced the continuation and expansion of a scheme to pay tuition fees for Service leavers undertaking level 3 further education or undergraduate higher education courses for the first time, funded by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Ministry of Defence. These announcements implement two of the commitments given in the Conservative - Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement.

BBC News reports that new measures to help soldiers who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress are due to be unveiled at the Conservative Party conference:

As Republican senators rejected attempts to reverse the so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy which prohibits openly gay personnel in the US armed forces, a decade after similar rules were abolished in the UK the head of the British Army's diversity unit confirmed it had been consulted by its military counterparts across the Atlantic.