Was the Falklands conflict the last war of its kind that Britain will ever face in terms of a direct threat to British interests?

Rear Admiral Chris Parry, author Down South: A Falklands War Diary, who served in the Falklands as a young officer on a helicopter on HMS Antrim, said that "it was a war the government had to fight if it was going to survive and stretched our defence establishment to the limits"

The Falklands war was a "clean fight", he said, while more recent conflicts have been wars of political choice.

But Bronwen Maddox, editor of Prospect magazine, argued that it was not the last "clean war" - Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and Britain's intervention in the Sierra Leone civil war in 2000 were situations where it was felt that there was a strong moral case to intervene.

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