Britain's fighting over funding for their armed forces,

with several articles I've seen over the last few days. This one's recent:
When Gordon Brown was presented with four options on how best to boost the British campaign in Helmand, he chose the cheapest, authoritative sources disclosed yesterday.

While the service chiefs and John Hutton, then Defence Secretary, supported the option of sending an extra 2,000 troops to Afghanistan, the Prime Minister opted only to send a 700-strong battalion for a limited period.

With the approval of Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, he announced in April that the 700-strong deployment would boost numbers during the period of the presidential election, set for August 20. Mr Brown’s rejection of the more expensive options was a setback for the military establishment.

The heads of the three Armed Services, the Chief of the Defence Staff and Mr Hutton had all agreed that the British Task Force in Helmand needed 2,000 extra permanent troops to improve conditions in the province. They believed that the success of the mission was at stake and failure to send more troops would undermine the progress that had been made with great loss of life by the British Forces, and let the Taleban off the hook.

“But the Treasury put a total block on spending more money, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was against it, too, so the Prime Minister went for the least expensive option,” one source told The Times.

So they're arguing about 'options'. Well, read this at the end(bold mine):
— Details from the journal of a Welsh Guards platoon commander who died in May after being injured in Afghanistan were published last night.

Lieutenant Mark Evison, 26, wrote: “I have a lack of radios, water, food and medical equipment. This, with manpower, is what these missions lack. It is disgraceful to send a platoon into a very dangerous area with two weeks’ water and food and one team medics’ pack. Injuries will be sustained which I will not be able to treat and deaths will occur which could have been stopped. We are walking on a tightrope and from what it seems here are likely to fall unless drastic measures are undertaken.”
I read this, and I can't really come up with words that cover it. And we've got a bunch of chickenshit politicians here who'd see our troops in the same damn position. Maybe they are talking about it, but if they're not I don't know why a lot of Brits aren't discussing tar, feathers and ropes. Or whatever their local options are.