Closer military co-operation with France "makes absolute sense" but troops are unlikely to serve side by side in single brigades, the new head of the UK's Armed Forces has said.
Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir David Richards hailed the extensive joint working programme set to be agreed by Prime Minister David Cameron and President Nicholas Sarkozy at an Anglo-French summit in London on Tuesday.
"From a purely practical military perspective - and I tend to view life through that prism - we have been working very closely with the French ever since... the First World War, but particularly in Nato," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
"We lost some of that in the 1990s and the last 10 years or so, so we are almost going back to the very close co-operation we had in the Cold War era.
"It makes absolute sense, from my perspective, as we are going to fight alongside the French, which has been our plan for a long time, to be as good at it in training as we possibly can be."
Asked about reports that the two nations' soldiers could serve alongside each other in a single brigade, he said: "That is one step beyond what I think is going to be in it.
"We are going to fight in something called an expeditionary joint force, which sees us possibly working alongside them at brigade level but not within the same brigade."
Cuts announced in last month's strategic defence and security review mean that Britain will be unable in future to mount operations on the scale of the current intervention in Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq.
The Army's troop level is being reduced by around 7,000, taking it to 95,000 by 2015, and its holdings of Challenger 2 battle tanks will be cut by 40% and heavy artillery by 35%.
