Just out of interest, what do the Navies of Italy and Spain use for AEW?
Going back to the manning issue, experimentation is taking place into new ways of manning ships, including swapping the crews of ships of the same class, augmentation using personnel taken from sister ships in the UK or from the squad system, and others. I hope they remember the importance of a coherent crew for morale and psychological reasons. Also a recent FOST briefing said that the changeover of personnel under TOPMAST lead of ships needing more training to bring the level of teamwork back up.
Unfortunately I think more cuts are on the way, particularly in the training and support areas.