Further big cuts in defence spending would lead to the loss of the UK's armed forces capability, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has warned.
Speaking ahead of the chancellor's upcoming spending review, he said the military was already "extremely taut" after the biggest departmental cuts since the end of the Cold War.
He told the BBC he would be "fighting the corner for my budget and defence".
Other Tory ministers see more savings from the welfare budget, he added.
Reductions in defence spending for 2013-15 in addition to those in 2010's Strategic Defence and Security Review were outlined in last year's Autumn statement.
But Downing Street said last month that the military would not be immune from further financial cuts in Chancellor George Osborne's spending review later this year.
A report this week from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) suggested this could lead to additional reductions of more than £1bn a year in the defence budget from 2015.
It is rare for a senior minister to speak out so publicly about cuts that are still the subject of such tense negotiation.
But Philip Hammond is clearly trying to draw the battle lines ahead of the chancellor's Spending Review for post 2015.
George Osborne has to make savings of at least £10bn.
If that were to translate into cuts right across departments - save for those that have been "ring-fenced" - then the Ministry of Defence could lose more than another £1bn from its budget.
Mr Hammond says while there may be some scope for "modest efficiency savings" he's adamant that he won't be able to make significant cuts without eroding Britain's military capabilities - in other words making more troops redundant and axing more military equipment.
The defence secretary thinks the savings should come from other departments, namely the welfare budget.
That puts him on a collision course with the Conservative's coalition partners. Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, has already publicly stated that he has no plans to make further savings in welfare budget.
Speaking to the BBC as he oversaw a Royal Marines training exercise in Norway, Mr Hammond said: "There may be some modest reductions we can make through further efficiencies and we were look for those, but we won't be able to make significant further cuts without eroding military capability."
He added: "We are already extremely taut. We have some very challenging targets ahead of us to deliver the outcome of the last spending review and I'm clear that we won't be able to deliver big further savings."
Mr Hammond said: "My job as secretary of state is to fight the corner for defence.
"Of course, I understand the chancellor's challenge. He has to find additional savings in order to consolidate the public finances, as we have to do. But we need to look broadly across government at how we are going to do that, not just narrowly at a few departments."
Rusi's Prof Michael Clarke said further cuts in defence would have to be made in personnel because the budget for "a big programme of new equipment and maintaining existing equipment" was already in place.
"If you don't think that the armed forces will be doing as much in the next five to eight years, once Afghanistan is in the rear-view mirror, then you might take that risk," he told BBC One's Breakfast.
"Certainly, the armed forces have been continuously in operation since 1991 when the Cold War came to an end.
"So it would be a bit optimistic to think that process that has gone on now for over 20 years would suddenly stop once we withdraw from Afghanistan."
Battle linesBBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale said Mr Hammond's point was that "he's already lost 30,000 members of the armed forces, he's lost the only aircraft carrier that Britain had, he's lost the Harrier jets and any more big cuts would force him to contemplate losing things that he's not prepared to lose".
He said tense negotiations over the next public spending round were already under way and Mr Hammond was publicly drawing the lines of battle.
But our correspondent said the suggestion that savings could come from the welfare budget is likely to put him at loggerheads with his Lib Dem coalition partners who believe that cuts to welfare have gone far enough.
In a Daily Telegraph interview, Mr Hammond said that other Conservative cabinet ministers believed that the greatest burden of any cuts should fall on the welfare budget.
He said there was a "body of opinion within cabinet who believes that we have to look at the welfare budget again... if we are going to get control of public spending on a sustainable basis".
He added that in the long-term "we should be seeing welfare spending falling" on the back of rising employment.
On Thursday, a report by Public Accounts Committee of MPs revealed the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had bought £1.5bn worth of raw materials and consumable supplies - like uniforms and ammunition - between 2009 and 2011 that it had not used.
The government has pledged "to reverse decades of lax inventory management".
"Considerable progress has been made since 2010; the size and value of our holdings are now heading in the right direction and we plan to spend almost £2bn less on inventory over the next four years," Defence Equipment Minister Philip Dunne said.
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