ALMOST a lifetime ago, as a teenage cadet sergeant in the Air Training Corps, I recall preparing for an exercise with squadrons from all over the country during Easter camp at a Royal Air Force base in darkest Yorkshire.

The officers were a motley crew; some regulars, others long retired war veterans, a number of reservists and several barely older than ourselves who'd graduated through the cadet ranks.

Either way, as they filed into an office to pool their different shades of experience in preparation for giving the senior cadets a pre-exercise briefing, I remember they outnumbered us.

To our collective delight, we soon overheard raised voices, then angry shouts turning to ranting bedlam, which only subsided when someone bellowed an order containing an extremely rude word.

Minutes later they all shuffled out looking sheepish and I overheard a young pilot officer from another squadron confide to one of his cadets: "Got a bit nasty. We couldn't decide who was in charge."

That came back to me at the weekend, while reading extracts from former military intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge's book Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure In Iraq and Afghanistan, in which he points out that defence cuts in themselves are not the problem.

Certainly not when the modern RAF has three times as many senior officers as it has flying squadrons, the Army more generals at circa £160,000-a-year salaries than helicopters or operational tanks, while the Royal Navy has more admirals than ships, none of which surprisingly bears the name HMS Pinafore. Yet.

The army has only two armoured divisions ready for action but 37 major generals, and 10 brigades ready for deployment but no fewer than 170 brigadiers earning £100,000-a-year commanding them.

While squaddies face redundancy or a lifetime of suffering, minus limbs or senses, having earned barely £20,000 at the other end of scale, many senior officers perform over-qualified deeds of administrative bravado from behind a desk because there's simply not enough for them to do.

Forget deciding who's in charge; more a question of what they charge.

ONE of the photographic images of last week's Tory Party conference captured the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland discussing phone-hacking scandals with a louche actor who plays the same hooray role whatever the film and probably never hears the words 'divine' or 'brown' without shuddering. Guess which of them wasn't wearing a tie?