The Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel are fully-equipped to serve missions and conduct operations whenever and wherever they are deployed by the government, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said on Friday.

All diggers, Ms Gillard said, enjoy the best force protection measures that Canberra can extend at a cost of some $1.7 billion in defence expenditures for the federal government.

"We provided the best force protection measures we can and we have certainly adopted every force protection measure that has been recommended to us by the hierarchy of defence," the prime minister was reported by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) as saying.

She conceded that Aussie troops remain exposed to dangers in theatres of conflicts where they serve, such as in Afghanistan, but insisted that "we will always do what is necessary to give our troops the maximum safety as they go about difficult and dangerous work."

Ms Gillard was reacting to a speech by Army commander Lt Gen David Morrison, which was published in advance on Friday by The Australian, criticising the Labor-led government's decision to slash defence spending in the years ahead.

The cuts would bring down the defence budget to its lowest level in the past 70 years, political analysts said, but more worrisome, according to Gen Morrison, is the thought that the ADF is being pushed to "a point where doing more with less risks becoming a cavalier disregard for the ability of forces to survive against credible peer competition."

"The current straitened fiscal climate poses a very real risk to the army's approved plan for development out to 2030," News Ltd publication quoted the Army chief as saying in the speech, which was scheduled to be delivered before the University of Canberra's National Security Institute.

Gen Morrison called on federal authorities that "this is not the time to reduce our deployable military capability."

Doing so, he added, would leave the ADF likely capable of handling military missions and even delivering some amount of success but with "commensurate acceptable levels of risk to our troops."

The top-ranking ADF official found an ally in Gen Peter Leahy, who once served as Australia's Army boss.

Gen Leahy backed Gen Morrison's assertion that Labor's defence plans could leave the ADF with a force that is negligible both is size and capabilities.

In an interview with ABC, he noted that while Australia appears ready to engage in international peacekeeping missions, supporting them with a shrinking size of the Army "would be the wrong thing to do."

"(Gen Morrison) is concerned as I am concerned that ... the force that is most likely to be used in the future, is just ill-prepared," Gen Leahy told ABC.

"Let's not repeat the mistakes that we made before the Second World War," he added.

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