Just as President Barack Obama's plan to nearly double U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan gets into high gear, Britain's involvement in the war has come under the fiercest criticism yet at home as a result of a steep increase in British casualties, including the deaths of 15 soldiers in the past 10 days. The latest losses are the heaviest British forces have suffered in any comparable period since the 1982 Falklands War. With the Defense Ministry's announcement of eight soldiers' deaths on Friday, Britain's toll in Afghanistan is now 184 killed, five more than its total losses in Iraq, where Britain's combat commitment ended this spring. The deaths have generated grim images that have led the nightly television news, of slate-gray transport aircraft carrying coffins landing at a military air base in Wiltshire and being driven slowly in hearses past crowds lining the high street in Wootton Bassett, a nearby town. When five coffins passed down the street on Friday, on their way to a mortuary in Oxford, women wailed. Britain's casualties are far lower than those suffered by U.S. forces. But with Britain's far smaller population and troop deployments, the latest deaths -- from a force of 9,000 -- have been as much of a shock here as the heavy U.S. troop losses in Iraq at the height of that conflict were in the United States. Gordon Brown, has argued that Britain has to fight on in Afghanistan as a way of preventing terrorist attacks at home. The main opposition party, the Conservatives, have so far agreed. But Brown is facing an outcry from those who say the government must answer for the growing number of soldiers killed because of what they describe as an underfinanced defense budget, $55 billion this year. Critics say that the insufficient budget has led to a failure to deploy enough troops and to equip them with enough helicopters and enough blast-resistant armored vehicles. It has been an open secret at Whitehall for years that top generals have been frustrated by being ordered to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as handle overseas peacekeeping commitments, with a budget that is one of the lowest among leading Western nations, at 2.5 percent of Britain's gross domestic product. 'They continue to allow the army to operate in those ridiculous tin-can Land Rovers when they should have been equipped three years ago with American Humvees,' Tony Phillipson, father of a 29-year-old army captain killed in 2006, told the BBC on Friday. 'The Afghan army has 4,500 Humvees. Why haven't our soldiers got them?' 