Faith Eckersall (Daily Echo, November 20) poses the question: “Are the 189 days it took military and MOD personnel to assist with Top Gear stunts in the last five years a disgraceful waste of money and resources or are they a brilliant showcase for the excellent work being done by our armed forces?” She calls this the “moral question of the week”. I find myself in agreement with her conclusion but maybe not for quite the reasons she has in mind. I feel much more comfortable with our regular armed forces playing games with Clarkson and co, performing on Bournemouth Beach and even using HMS Ark Royal as a backdrop to a film on the Rolls Royce Phantom, than playing all-too-real ‘war games’ in Iraq and Afghanistan which costs the lives of (literally) thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. I even agree with the MoD assertion that this all costs “nothing”. This is a concept little understood, perhaps, but since we pay for the forces whether they do anything or not, the marginal cost of them playing games (which fortunately harm no-one) is, indeed, little or nothing. Nevertheless, it does leave us with the uncomfortable problem of whether we really want to recruit thousands of our young men (mostly) to sign up to a life which may well involve them in overseas travel and sometimes being required to kill people. Sometimes, indeed, even losing their own lives in the process. Tony Williams, Warnford Road, Bournemouth