Ahead of Liam Fox's conference speech, it emerged that he wants to cut Ministry of Defence costs by 25%.
Aid donors, who still provide 30% of Uganda's budget, are becoming concerned about rising defence costs, now 20% of the budget.
Switzerland's conscription army is facing an uncertain future, amid calls for compulsory military service to be abolished, and political pressure to keep defence costs down.
Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has stated that it is "right and proper that those who can afford to pay towards the cost of their legal defence costs do so".
And, as it happens, the resources available to the SFO may be squeezed further still if - as is likely - it is ordered to pay the defence costs of the Tchenguiz brothers, which run to many millions of pounds.
Speaking at the Farnborough Air Show he said the defence industry must cut costs, or the government would have to cut procurement projects.
Several devote more than three-quarters of their defence budgets to personnel costs: maintaining armies of greying, pot-bellied dentists, cooks and clerks in khaki, rather than investing in expeditionary troops.
Sir John rules this out but says the Ministry of Defence's administrative and other costs should be "minimised where possible through recourse to different kinds of volunteer funding".
But training with real equipment invites accidents and generally costs even more, so defence ministries are keen on simulators.
It also argues that it would improve security for the weapons and lower costs at a time when defence budgets are under strain.
In 2009 the Pentagon realised that a breach of the Nunn-McCurdy rules on over-budget defence-procurement programmes was inevitable, because costs would exceed the original baseline by more than 50%.
It was supposed to marry BAE's expertise in military and defence with EADS' aerospace juggernaut, Airbus, and was not simply aimed at cutting costs and employee numbers, according to an editorial authored by the two companies' bosses in defence of the deal.
Barclays' defence is that it was dreadfully unfair that its perceived borrowing costs were higher than other banks.
BAe, a big defence contractor, reckons that 16% can be taken from central government running costs and to the horror of the biggest civil service union that 80, 000 jobs could go.
ECONOMIST: Public-sector reform: A Whitehall revolution? | The
The BBC's Steve Rosenberg, in Moscow, says that in the six years that Mr Serdyukov was defence minister, he tried to reform Russia's outdated armed forces by cutting costs and personnel and by boosting efficiency.
BBC: Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov fired by Putin
The deal was supposed to marry BAE's expertise in military and defence with EADS' aerospace juggernaut, Airbus, and was not simply aimed at cutting costs and employee numbers, according to the two companies' bosses.
"Its costs are vastly over-stated by its opponents, amounting only to 0.5% of the defence budget over its lifetime, " he told MPs.
应用推荐