Is it any surprise when we have had 20 years of cuts in personnel, both military and civil servants. Reorganised headquarters and organisations on a biannual basis, converted paper files to electronic ones and contracted so many core elements out to the cheapest bidders. How many people have just given up and don't care any more? How many people who are about to be compulsary redundant are going to leave under a cloud of bitterness.
Interesting story a few years ago with huge cuts taking place 'in the city'. In some companies, employees being made redundant were getting calls to the HR department to be told their services were no longer required at the same time as staff from the IT department were removing computers from their desk spaces and closing down all electronic access to business systems. They were given immediate notice to leave, had to hand over access cards and were escorted by security to clear out desks before being shown the door. Grossly unpleasant and not what you would like to see in Defence but the whole idea was to prevent bitter and twisted employees causing any possible chance of financial damage before leaving the office.
Could we see the same over the next few years?
Pretty common in the Civil sector.. Mind you accountants can take a lot of the blame, at one large (at the time) UK maintainance facility they had contractors in doing a large check on a 4 engined airliner because accountants had costed it and it was cheaper to have contractors do the work......... fine, the problem was there wasn't another aircraft in, so all the permanent engineering staff were standing around doing nothing as they had been told that only contractors could work on the aircraft.... so the company was actually paying out over double on the manpower whilst over half of them stood idly by, something lost on the accountants.
So bad was the situation that one day an employee noticed someone putting stickers on the ground equipment and enquired what he was doing..... turned out he was from another company and was there to put bids in on the ground equipment as the company was closing down the facility and it was the first the workforce heard of it!!!!
I seem to remember most Jags that went in would never get off the ground with the amount of stores that were written off on them.