Defence has been mismanaged desperately by the politicians, who are clueless as to how to fix DES/DPA/MoD(PE)
The root cause of most problems discussed here is senior RAF officers, not politicians or DE&S. As demonstrated on the successful "campaigns" conducted by a few retired officers and, mainly, civilians.
Instead of simply saying "fix DE&S", why not offer an opinion on what is wrong with DE&S (and by excluding DEC and HQ staffs you'll never identify the problem, never mind a fix), a proposed solution for ppruners to debate, why you think the opinions of others are wrong if they differ from yours, and tell us what your MP said when you put all this to him.
By mentioning DE&S, may I assume your major concern is waste of money? (Nimrod, Chinook Mk3 etc). If so, I agree.
The mandated means of avoiding waste (as far as possible) is to conduct Requirement Scrutiny. This is a legal obligation (to PUS), and to make a false declaration while exercising this obligation is to commit fraud.
In the past two months, the Head of the Civil Service (Sir Robert Kerslake) and Min(AF) (Mr Andrew Robothan MP) have both confirmed, in writing;
1. It is an offence to refuse to obey an order to make such a false declaration, and,
2. It is not an offence to issue this order to commit fraud.
Their replies contained precisely the same wording. That is, they were briefed by the very people who have, for many years, issued said orders and/or condoned them. The last time PUS was advised of this illegal activity, in an internal MoD report, he took no action. Nor did the PAC, HCDC or CSC. That report included a case study where one programme manager (myself) was instructed to knowingly waste over £100M per year, year on year, by an RAF Air Vice Marshall; by implementing a policy developed under an Air Chief Marshall (who, say it quietly, posts here). That's a lot of money when taken across a 6,000 or so procurement organisation subject to the same rulings. This policy was later fully endorsed and executed by the Chief of Defence Procurement (a retired Admiral).
I used to say that solving this problem would go a long way to solving MoD's financial "black hole". I haven't changed my mind. It is why I sympathise, to a degree, with HM Treasury. They see MoD as a bottomless pit of waste. The political failure is to have an independent review, instead of allowing the staffs responsible to judge their own case. At a certain level, the ongoing redundancies (both Servicemen and Civilian) is more case of the Treasury giving up on MoD policing itself, and taking this action as a last resort. It is way too late for Service Chiefs to say "If we stop wasting money can we reduce the redundancies and cut backs"? You may have noticed, serving VSOs tend to protect their predecessors/mentors.
What I'd propose today is for Government to freeze the cuts for a year, find a copy of the above report (by MoD's own admission they destroyed it, but I sent my own copy to the PAC last year - no reply) and set up an independent implementation team of the 19 recommendations (all of which fall into the "mandated policy" category so no new policy need be developed).
Keep a record of results (savings/efficiencies that do not affect capability) and reassess the need for cuts. This is precisely what we did in during the 6 years preceding the reports issue. The savings were truly astronomical. OC was enhanced. The disciplinary action from the RAF Chief Engineer and CDP swift and draconian. This time he and his like must be kept out of the loop. Discuss if you wish.