For anyone who cares about this country's naval traditions there were two sorry sights this week.

The first was to be found in the distressing photographs from a shipyard in Turkey, where one of the Royal Navy’s condemned aircraft carriers, HMS Invincible, was being cut up for scrap metal.

A veteran of the 1982 Falklands conflict and for long an integral component of naval air power the once proud ship was hardly living up to her name.

No less worrying was the second image: Prime Minister David Cameron at the despatch box in full Flashman mode telling the House of Commons that the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, had got it disastrously wrong when he claimed the navy was unable to sustain operations in Libya due to the savage cutbacks in the surface fleet.

Above all, the navy’s senior sailor had been strongly critical about the lack of carriers and their accompanying Harrier strike aircraft, a deficiency which he claimed was hindering operations.

Stanhope was only saying what many people in the navy already know, namely that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the UK to pretend that it is still a serious maritime power with ambitions to stay in the premier league.

However, the Prime Minister was having none of it.

Not only did he humiliate Stanhope by contradicting him in public but according to 10 Downing Street the First Sea Lord had been invited to attend a meeting “without coffee or biscuits” – a sure sign that he had been subjected to a tongue-lashing for his temerity in speaking his mind.

Stanhope has not been the only person to break ranks, but he is the most senior and for his pains he also faced the indignity of being taken to task by his boss, Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir David Richards.

The reason for the disquiet was prompted by the row over the carriers, but it has its origins in last year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, which failed lamentably to do its job and was simply an exercise in cost-cutting.

Hence the decision to axe two carriers, the other being HMS Ark Royal, and to put the dependable Harrier strike aircraft into early retirement.

Hence, too, the decision to scrap the Nimrod maritime surveillance aircraft and to order the immediate demolition of the existing nine models, another bad image for the scrapbooks (no pun intended).

Worse followed. In an attempt to ensure the Harrier decision will never be revoked, the Ministry of Defence organised a hasty fire sale which allowed the recently, and expensively, refurbished strike aircraft to be sold off to the United States Marine Corps at a knockdown price.

And, equally covertly, the MoD has woken up to the fact that its fleet of nuclear submarines cannot operate securely without Nimrod and is negotiating with Boeing for the supply of five similar types of aircraft – the P8 Poseidon which has not yet entered service.

So far, so unsurprising is the cry of those within the armed forces who have become accustomed to decades of MoD inefficiency and profligacy.

For years equipment has never matched the country’s strategic ambitions with the result that forces have been sent in to action under strength and woefully equipped. That was certainly the case in Afghanistan where the lack of suitable armoured vehicles and an absence of reliable helicopters were not just an inconvenience.

Men and women in uniform paid for those shortcomings with their lives, and broken bodies and minds.

That’s why the uproar has been so loud and so cantankerous.

That’s why Sally Thorneloe spoke out when her husband Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe was killed in a bomb blast in Helmand province.

With great courage she revealed the doubts and fears that had plagued her husband during the Welsh Guards’ deployment in 2009 – the lack of men to secure ground that had been captured and, above all, the shortage of equipment to protect the guardsmen from the scourge of roadside bombs.

Now, it could be said that those who serve in the armed forces have signed up for a job that’s never going to be easy and that they have to face the risks involved in the line of duty.

It’s a fair point, and one that all service personnel accept, but it has to be balanced by an equally cogent argument.

These young people do their work on behalf of UK plc.

At the behest of our politicians – and through them us – they go into action, put their bodies on the line and simply make do when things go wrong, as go wrong they almost certainly will.

As evidence we may look no further than the events unfolding in Libya.

The equipment at the disposal of the navy and the air force is clearly inadequate for the task in hand with the result that the objectives of Nato’s no-fly zone have not been achieved.

Civilians are still being killed by Colonel Gaddafi’s tinpot armed forces while the wily dictator spends his days casually playing chess with his cohorts.

If this is the policy of liberal interventionism, as the Government claims, then it might be time to look again at our commitments and at how they can be achieved.

The whole point of the defence review was to gauge our global strategic aims, to assess what we could do and what was best left alone, and then to provide the armed forces with the wherewithal to carry out the policy.

This has not happened: cost-cutting has been the order of the day and muddle has been the result.

It is certainly true that our cuts in capability have not been matched by any cuts in global ambition.

That was the whole purpose of the defence review yet the outcome was fudged.

It’s too late to save HMS Invincible from the scrap yard but it would do no harm for the Prime Minister to add defence to his many policy U-turns … and think again.