Britain's armed forces minister said on Monday the country needed a national debate over the military's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Adam Ingram also insisted that army chief General Sir Richard Dannatt had not gone too far by calling for British troops to withdraw from Iraq "sometime soon".
Dannatt warned on Friday that withdrawal was needed soon from Iraq because the presence of British troops at times exacerbated Britain's security problems there and around the world.
"We do need a national debate about what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Balkans and elsewhere," Ingram said at RAF Molesworth air base in eastern England.
And he backed Dannatt, the chief of the general staff, saying that the military top brass needed to speak out.
"It is only right and proper that there is an open and mature national debate rather than a media feeding frenzy in which people's comments can be taken out of context," the government minister said.
"I don't think he (Dannatt) overstepped the mark. That is the job of senior military commanders. They have got to tell the truth. They cannot hide the truth.
"He was not saying anything much different from our own views."
Dannatt sparked a firestorm last week with his comments in an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper.
He was widely interpreted as contradicting Prime Minister Tony Blair's defence of the presence of British troops in Iraq in September, when he said that if Britain were to withdraw, the country "will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril."
Backing down from his interview with the Mail, Dannatt said British troops would remain in Iraq "until the job is done" and said their withdrawal should not be linked to any problems over their presence there.
He later received Blair's backing.