GQ stays but biscuits go at Ministry of Defence Service personnel recuperating at centres such as RAF Headley Court are given 'recreational titles' such as GQ and Cosmopolitan. Budget cuts at the Ministry of Defence have deprived the military of ships, planes and thousands of men and women. Biscuits have also been banned from meetings in Whitehall, and coffee machines removed from corridors. But at least members of the armed forces are not short of reading material. According to the MoD's own figures, the department subscribes to 930 magazines, newspapers and periodicals every year, at a cost of £617,000. Some magazines have names you might expect to see on coffee tables in mess halls up and down the country: Soldier of Fortune, Jane's Defence Weekly and Combat Aircraft. Many more have pleasingly nerdish titles of the sort you would expect to appeal to specialists on the frontline and those in support of them. Thorax and Welding International will be must-reads for someone. And if they don't take your fancy, there's always Cavalry & Armor or Concrete Engineering, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict and the Journal of Head Trauma. Or maybe, Counter-terrorism Homeland and Disaster Medicine. The full list has some names that defy comprehension. Zhurnal Eksperimentalnoi Teoreticheskoi Fiziki is one, though a quick Google search suggest physicists may be avid readers. But among the geeky trade journals are a few that might seem out of place in the dust and dirt of a forward operating base in Helmand. They are what the MoD calls "recreational titles": Cosmopolitan, GQ, Glamour UK, Woman, Children's Bookseller and, strangest of all, House Beautiful. BBC Good Food, What Car, Top Gear and Mountain Bike Rider are also on subscription, though the military insists that these magazines are not meant primarily for troops knee-deep in muddy ditches. The glossy titles tend to be sent to those soldiers, sailors and air crew who are recovering in hospitals and clinics. Money is tight at the MoD - in January the army will embark on another round of redundancies - but military bean-counters insist the magazines are good for morale and value for money. The department insists subscriptions to magazines are given great scrutiny and units intending to buy them "must make robust cases for doing so." "The MoD uses a pan-government contract to purchase journals on subscription, which provides a discount to the taxpayer," a spokesman said. The contract is primarily used for academic, technical, medical and trade publications for the MoD colleges, training centres, technical information centres and medical units, including those in operational theatres. A small number of recreational titles are taken for use in personnel recovery centres. Though spending by the MoD is tighter than ever, theft from the military continued apace this year. The latest figures showed equipment of all varieties was reported missing, including some that would have taken ingenuity to remove. A pony said to be worth £500 disappeared for several months before it was returned. Rifle cleaning kits, DVDs, TVs, sleeping bags and galvanised shackles also disappeared, along with silver jugs, teapots and baskets. Racing bikes, a fridge, a drain cover, sniper belts and more than £20,000 in cash went missing too.